Revenue Sharing Contracts in Coalition Loyalty Reward Supply Chain Planning: A Stochastic Programming Approach

Abstract

A coalition loyalty program (CLP) is a business strategy adopted by companies to increase and retain their customers. An operational challenge in this regard is to determine the coordination mechanism with business partners. This study investigated the role of revenue-sharing contracts (RSCs) considering customer satisfaction in coalition loyalty reward supply chain planning. A two-stage stochastic programming approach was considered for the solution considering the demand uncertainty. We aimed to investigate the impact of RSCs on the decision-making and profitability of the host firm of this supply chain taking into account the maximization of the profit coming from the CLP compared to the more common wholesale price contract (WPC). After the model was solved, computational experiments were performed to evaluate and compare the effects of RSCs and WPCs on the performance of the loyalty program (LP). The results revealed that RSC is an effective incentive to increase the host’s profit and reduce its cost. These findings add new insights to the management literature, which can be used by business decision makers.

Keywords

• loyalty program
• supply chain
• reward
• uncertainty
• stochastic programming
• points