The Role of Marketing Effort in Enhancing Closed-Loop Supply Chains Under Recycling Competition

We investigate a closed-loop supply chain system comprising manufacturers and retailers engaged in recycling competition. The manufacture is the CLSC Stackelberg Leader. By developing a Stackelberg model incorporating marketing, we analyze the impact of marketing efforts by different agents on the entire system, specifically focusing on marketing conducted by the manufacturer, the retailer, and the centralized supply chain. Our findings reveal that the manufacturer consistently prefers the retailer to undertake marketing effort. In contrast, the retailer favors the manufacturer handling marketing when recycling competition intensity is low but prefer to conduct marketing himself when the competition intensity is high. The extent of environmental harm under different models depends on base demand: no marketing results in the least harm when base demand is low, marketing by manufacturers minimizes harm when base demand is moderate, and marketing by retailers causes the least harm when base demand is high. Finally, we perform a numerical analysis of the marketing cost-sharing contract and find that an appropriate sharing ratio consistently enhances the profitability of the entire supply chain.