Pricing and Coordination in a Fresh-Cut Flower Supply Chain with Freshness Preference and Presale Strategy

Abstract

Fresh-cut flowers are highly perishable products whose quality deteriorates rapidly over time, posing significant challenges to supply chain management. This paper investigates pricing and coordination strategies in a two-echelon fresh-cut flower supply chain consisting of one supplier and one e-commerce platform that operates a two-period selling model combining presale and spot sales. We develop Stackelberg game models that explicitly incorporate consumer freshness preference and freshness decay dynamics, and derive optimal pricing and freshness-keeping decisions under both decentralized and centralized decision-making structures. Our analysis reveals that the double marginalization effect becomes more pronounced as consumers become more sensitive to freshness, resulting in efficiency losses of 20%–30% under decentralized decision-making. We further demonstrate that increasing the presale proportion incentivizes greater freshness-keeping investment throughout the supply chain, as preselling reduces demand uncertainty and associated waste. To address the efficiency loss, we design a combined "revenue sharing and cost sharing" (RS-CS) contract and prove that perfect coordination is achieved when the cost-sharing ratio equals the revenue-sharing ratio and the wholesale price satisfies a specific compensation condition. Numerical experiments validate the model results and confirm the robustness of the coordination mechanism. This study provides both theoretical insights and practical guidance for fresh-cut flower supply chain management.