Increasing attention to sustainable development issues and competition between different supply chains are forcing the stakeholders to use different incentives to capture more market share. Collecting channels are one of the effective topics in the reverse competitive chains. Because of the importance of this issue, we consider two collecting reverse supply chains consist of a retailer and a manufacturer who compete together by proposing more rewards to the customers. One of these chains tries to facilitate the collecting process and obtain more market share by using the direct and traditional channels advantages. The other one uses only the traditional channel. Hence, the return rate of each channel not only depends on the self-reward but also is function of the cross-rewards suggested to the customer by the competitors in the other channels. The competitive environment in our model consists of internal and external competitions. Competition between two channels of one chain infers to internal competition, external competition that points out to competition among two supply chains. We apply three game theory structures to obtain the optimal channels rewards: Nash, Nash-Stackelberg-first supply chain, and Nash-Stackelberg-second supply chain. Finally, we comparing the results of decision variables and profit function of members under three structures through numerical analysis. Our numerical investigations show that e-channel because of less costly than traditional channel proposes more appropriate reward to customers, so this channel could obtain a more substantial share of the market. Moreover, the results reveal that highest return rate occurred under Nash scenario while Nash-Stackelberg-first supply chain and NashStackelberg-second supply chain are the most economic scenarios for the first and the second supply chains, respectively.

Introduction

Increasing customer’ attention to environmental issues has encouraged the industrialists and researchers to focus on sustainable products. Reverse and closed-loop supply chain are well adapted to the sustainability goals (Eskandarpour et al., 2015). Moreover, environmental legislation prescribes manufacturers to invest in recycling and remanufacturing process in order to decrease the need for earth’ natural resources and also waste out of landfills (Qiang, 2015). For instance, Xerox Company could keep more than 145 million pounds of waste out through recycling process during two decades ago.1 Moreover, employment growth, improving productivity, increasing competitive and economic advantages are the other results of implementing remanufacturing process which are considered as the important motivations for industrials (Eskandarpour et al., 2015; Rezapour et al., 2014; Golicic and Smith, 2013; Lee et al., 2011). Many companies paid attention to implementing the recycling process, among the different products, computer and electronic goods are one of the successful industries in the remanufacturing process (Das and Chowdhury, 2012). Generally, reverse logistics consist of some operations like collecting the used products, transfer them from customers to the manufacturer and finally inspecting and remanufacturing. In today’s competitive business environment, the companies should be trying to convince the customers to return their used products. The ways of collecting obsolete products are one of the important items in reverse logistics (RL) which have a significant impact on customer decisions and return rate. Traditional channel, e-channel and dual channel are the most wellknown distribution and collecting channels. In the traditional channel, the retailer appears in the role of an intermediary between manufacturer and customer. In other words, the used products return through the physical store. Therefore, the retailer inspects the returned product and proposes a reward to the customer for eligible devices.