The influence of franchisee loss on logistics network: A new perspective from NK model

Franchisee has become a powerful tool for many logistics enterprises in affiliate mode to seize market share. But affiliate mode has emerged many drawbacks that can aggravate the divergence of interests between franchisees and headquarter and then leads to the problem of franchisee loss. In this paper, the franchisee loss problem is studied from the perspective of vulnerability. The loss of a franchisee is seen as a node that has been attacked. The performance change before and after an attack is used to reflect the strength of a network's vulnerability. Efficacy and efficiency are proposed to measure the performance change based on NK model, which specializes in studying complex adaptive system such as logistics network. Results show that efficacy and efficiency vary according to network scale. For relatively small networks, their efficacy shows more obvious fluctuation with the variation of network scale than efficiency does. In these networks, the redundancy of network nodes is high. But the percentage of redundant nodes decreases with the increase of scale and the efficacy can be improved with the reduction of redundant nodes. The network structure of them is not stable. As for relatively large networks, efficiency fluctuates more apparently with the change of complexity than efficacy does. In these networks, most nodes are influential and the percentage of influential nodes shows obvious change with complexity. The network structure tends to be stable. In conclusion, the study on the influence of franchisee loss from vulnerability can provide us with greater visibility and insight into the organization structure of logistics networks. Corresponding cases are introduced to confirm our conclusions.