Forward and reverse flows pricing decisions for two competing supply chains with common collection centers in an intuitionistic fuzzy environment

This paper studies the selling and the acquisition price decisions for the products of two partially overlapping competing supply chains in an intuitionistic fuzzy environment. In the forward flows, the supply chains are assumed to produce substitutable products and sell them in a duopoly marketplace. The reverse flows are also concentrated on collecting and recycling the used products. While regularly it is assumed that the structures of the competing supply chains are completely separated, this paper assumes that the supply chains benefit from the services of the same collection centers. Considering the collection centers and the two supply chains to act as three integrated entities having enough bargaining powers to affect the decisions of each other, this paper concentrates on investigating the effects of different power structure scenarios on the optimal pricing decisions made by all of the parties involved in the problem. Another important feature of this study is that it employs the concept of intuitionistic fuzzy sets to integrate uncertainties and impressions inevitable in real-world situations into the decision-making process. To achieve this purpose, first, a new credibility-based definition for the concept of intuitionistic fuzzy variables is provided. This concept is then employed in the process of developing the intuitionistic fuzzy pricing models. A new expected value operator is also defined which is employed to transform the credibility-based intuitionistic fuzzy programming problems into their crisp equivalents. A numerical example is employed to discuss the properties of the introduced concepts, providing some interesting managerial implications regarding the defined problem.