This paper revisits the impact of collection cost on a manufacturer’s optimal reverse channel choice. A manufacturer who remanufactures his own products has the choice between managing collection of used products himself, let the retailer manage collection or involve a third party company to manage collection. In particular, we consider a convex collection cost function depending on the collection rate. Contrary to previous literature, we show that the manufacturer always prefers retailer-managed collection, independent of collection cost. The retailer will always choose a positive collection rate. If collection cost is above a certain threshold, not all used products will be collected and the manufacturer (almost) collects all channel profits. Third party-managed collection is always dominated. In extensions, we also consider a restriction to equilibria and a minimum collection rate, which may be imposed by regulation. Both extensions may change the reverse channel choice to manufacturer-managed. Moreover, we see that it may be impossible for regulation to increase collection because the profit-maximizing collection rate may already be the highest economically viable one.

Pokharel and Liang [2012. A model to evaluate acquisition price and quantity of used products for remanufacturing. Int. J. Prod. Econ. 138, 170–176] considered a consolidation center that buys used products of different quality levels and sells them together with spare parts to a remanufacturer. The consolidation center׳s decision problem is to determine the acquisition price to offer for used products and the quantities of spare parts to buy. In this paper, comments on their work are given. It is shown that following Pokharel and Liang׳s original assumptions, the problem has a trivial solution. We then consider an alternative assumption where supply is uniform and depends on the acquisition price. For this setting, an efficient solution algorithm and numerical examples are provided. In a second model, additional assumptions are relaxed, allowing the consolidation center more flexibility. As expected, this further decreases cost.

Product reclamation is a critical process in remanufacturing. It is generally assumed in the literature that customers simply want to get rid of their used products without expecting any compensation for them. Some authors have only recently started looking into firms that offer a posted (fixed) price for them. Following recent reports suggesting that customers are increasingly open to bargaining, we compare using a posted price and bargaining to obtain used products. In our analysis, we consider an original manufacturer acting as a monopolist as well as a manufacturer and an independent remanufacturer acting in a duopoly. We analytically show that bargaining is always beneficial to the monopoly manufacturer. In the duopoly case, we distinguish a Cournot competition and a market with the manufacturer as Stackelberg leader. The results of a numerical study show that both firms will use posted pricing in the Cournot competition, especially if bargaining is not costless. By contrast, the remanufacturer can significantly increase his profit by using negotiations if he is the Stackelberg follower.