On returns policies with exogenous price

We contribute to current research on single-period returns policies by making a clear distinction between models in which transfer price is exogenous and models in which one dominant party unilaterally declares a price. We compare the equilibrium contracts that result from these two approaches and derive conditions for the equilibrium returns policy to be Pareto-efficient when transfer price is exogenous. Our main result is distribution free, but we make some interesting observations on channel performance when demand is uniformly distributed. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.