National Advertising and Cooperation in a Manufacturer-Two Retailers Channel

We consider a supply channel composed of one manufacturer and two symmetric retailers. Three cases are studied. The non-cooperation case is a leader-follower relationship. The manufacturer determines his spending in national advertising and the wholesale price. Then, retailers determine non-cooperatively the price for consumers. In the partial-cooperation case, retailers decide jointly for the price. In the full-cooperation case, all members of the channel cooperate by maximizing a joint profit function. Interestingly, partial-cooperation reduces the profits of retailers with respect to non-cooperation, when the degree of substituability between the two products proposed by retailers is low. Because of symmetry, this also implies that the total profit of retailers may decrease with partialcooperation. Thus, when the degree of substituability between products is low, it is in the interest of retailers to set their prices non-cooperatively. We propose a cooperative implementable contract between all channel members, which shares the extra-profit due to full-cooperation. We propose a new and unusual evaluation of consumers’ surplus which positively depends not only on the price-demand function but also on the spending in national advertising. Partial-cooperation is always the worst case for the manufacturer, the whole channel, consumers’ surplus and social welfare, while full-cooperation is the best case.