Impact of RFID Technology on Coordination of a Three-Tier Fresh Product Supply Chain

This paper focuses on the impact of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology adoption on supply chain coordination. We consider a three-tier supply chain consisting of one supplier, one transporter and one retailer with centralized and decentralized decision-making. Considering the factors of RFID tag cost and product freshness, two scenarios — with RFID and without RFID — are analyzed. In the decentralized supply chain, a revenue-sharing contract is established to explore each partner’s decisions on ordering quantity, wholesale price and profits. The results show that (1) the tag cost of RFID has different effects on the pricing decisions, ordering quantity and profit of an FPSC, and if the amount of transportation time compression increases, the range of the tag cost’s boundary value will be wider when adopting RFID technology; (2) when the members of an FPSC choose the optimal wholesale price, optimal initial fare and appropriate revenue-sharing coefficient, the FPSC can achieve a win–win result; and (3) the amount of transportation time compression has a positive correlation with the expected profit of the supplier, transporter and retailer but has a negative correlation with loss of the product.