Optimal Strategies of Retailers Facing Potential Crisis in an Online-to-Offline Supply Chain

We confine our interest to the O2O (online-to-offline) supply chain system consisting of an online retailer and an offline retailer. Given that the brand they sell may encounter a brand crisis that will damage the goodwill, we formulate an O2O supply chain model with the impact of random crisis to explore the countermeasures of retailers when facing a potential crisis. After analysis, we find the following: (1) The crisis happened earlier with the increase of hazard rate and retailers should lower their investment in the precrisis stage. (2) The existence of crisis divides the whole planning period into two phases and make retailers have different phase preference in different scenarios. In a word, retailers will pay more attention to the postcrisis stage with the increase of hazard rate and damage rate and therefore invest more in the postcrisis stage. (3) Crisis will decrease the investment level of retailers and therefore make the goodwill and profits lower than when there is no crisis.