147 / 2024-04-22 09:57:12

The effects of quality certification on remanufacturing considering consumers’ quality untrust

remanufacturing; quality certification; quality uncertainty

As an environmentally friendly and profitable production way, remanufacturing has huge potential to achieve sustainable development. Although remanufactured products have same quality like new products, remanufactured products have been bearing consumer bias due to the difficulty of identifying its real quality, thereby resulting in consumers’ untrust about its quality. Declaring the real quality information through certification is one of the ways to solve this problem. In this paper, we explore two quality certification modes, the self-declaration certification and the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) certification. We characterize consumers’ valuation about remanufactured products under these two certification modes, based on which we investigate the effects of quality certification on decisions of both the supplier and the manufacturer and how they can achieve a win-win situation. The results show that the consumers’ quality untrust and the certification fee have significant influence on their optimal decisions. When the certification fee is moderate, adopting the OEM certification is favorable for remanufacturing, and furthermore, it enables the supplier and the manufacturer to achieve a win-win situation.