The Impact of Rebate Distribution on Fairness Concerns in Supply Chains

The reasonable distribution of supply chain profits among supply chain members is the core of the stability of a supply chain. Manufacturer rebates are a normal method to improve the performance of a supply chain and balance profit distribution. Based on consideration of the behavior preferences of supply chain members, in this paper, we study the influence of rebate distribution on supply chain utility. We establish a supply chain utility model, including the proportion of distribution, fairness concern coefficient and effort level, and discuss three different situations of supply chain members. The results show that (i) a manufacturer’s rebate can more effectively improve the utility in a supply chain with fairness perception; (ii) with other conditions unchanged, the fairness perception of supply chain members will have a positive impact on their own utility; and (iii) at the same time, when the party who has more discourse power in the supply chain has a sense of fairness, this is conducive to realizing the stable development of the supply chain through changes in the proportion of rebate distribution.