Qualifying for a government's scrappage program to stimulate consumers' trade-in transactions? Analysis of an automobile supply chain involving a manufacturer and a retailer

We investigate an automobile supply chain where a manufacturer and a retailer serve a market with a fuel-efficient automobile under a scrappage program by the government. The program awards a subsidy to each consumer who trades in his or her used automobile with a new fuel-efficient automobile, if the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) for the new one does not exceed a cutoff level. We derive the conditions assuring that the manufacturer has an incentive to qualify for the program, and find that when the cutoff level is low, the manufacturer may be unwilling to qualify for the program even if the subsidy is high. We also show that when the manufacturer qualifies for the program, increasing the MSRP cutoff level would raise the manufacturer's expected profit but may decrease the expected sales. A moderate cutoff level can maximize the effectiveness of the program in stimulating the sales of fuel-efficient automobiles, whereas a sufficiently high cutoff level can result in the largest profit for the manufacturer. The retailer's profit always increases when the manufacturer chooses to qualify for the program. Furthermore, we compute the government's optimal MSRP cutoff level and subsidy for a given sales target, and find that as the program budget increases, the government should raise the subsidy but reduce the MSRP cutoff level to maximize sales. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.