Bilateral shock effect and alleviation strategy: a game-theoretical study in international medical devices supply chain in the pandemic context

COVID-19 pandemic had induced serious bilateral shock of surging demand and supply constraints for the international medical devices supply chains. This bilateral shock effect is characterized and investigated, and the corresponding alleviation strategies are explored for three-tier international medical devices supply chain in the pandemic context through game-theoretical decision models and corresponding numerical and sensitivity analyses in this article. The research results show that: (i) the coordination strategy outperforms the sequential strategy regarding the operational performance for three-tier international medical devices supply chain. (ii) international medical devices supply chain under the scenario with pandemic impact and supply constraint performs worst in all the scenarios, due to the bilateral shock effect of both supply-side constraints and demand-side fluctuations. (iii) stabilizing market demand fluctuations of medical devices, breaking through the supply capacity constraints of key modules, and adopting coordination strategy based on revenue sharing contract, would be effective alleviation strategies for the bilateral shock effect of pandemic.