Competitive used products collection strategies in a closed-loop supply chain through tri-partite evolutionary game theory

Sustainable development is critical today due to increasing demand for natural resources in a fast-growing globe. To facilitate efficient used products recycling management, this paper develops a tripartite evolutionary game model in order to examine the complex interactions between suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers while deciding on their used products collection strategies. Evolutionary stable strategies of the system entities are determined by solving the replicator dynamics and evaluating the stability requirements of the critical points. Numerical simulations are done to verify the plausibility of the model and explore the effects of parameters on the participants’ long-term strategies. The results show that, in a high procurement competition and low-profit environment, the manufacturer’s best long-term stable strategy is to procure used products, whereas the entire population of suppliers and retailers is expected to use a non-procurement strategy. However, under weak procurement competition and significant gain environment, each population’s stable behavior trends to favor purchasing of used products. Even though suppliers and retailers exhibit different stable behaviors in different situations, the manufacturer never changes; it always prefers the used products collection strategy.