Computers & Industrial Engineering 171 (2022) 108439 Available online 10 July 2022 0360-8352/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Pricing and advertising decisions in a direct-sales closed-loop supply chain Mohammad Asghari a , Hamid Afshari a , S.M.J. Mirzapour Al-e-hashem b, c , Amir M. Fathollahi-Fard d , Maxim A. Dulebenets e, * a Department of Industrial Engineering, Dalhousie University, 5269 Morris Street, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2, Canada b Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Iran c Rennes School of Business, 2 Rue Robert d’Arbrissel, 35065, Rennes, France d Department of Electrical Engineering, ´ Ecole de Technologie Sup´ erieure, University of Qu´ ebec, Montr´ eal, Canada e Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Florida A&M University-Florida State University (FAMU-FSU) College of Engineering, 2035 E Paul Dirac Dr., Sliger Building, Suite 275, Tallahassee, FL 32310, USA A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Closed-loop supply chain Remanufacturing Advertising-dependent returns Cross-price elasticity Crowd-Learning Particle Swarm Optimization ABSTRACT Remanufacturing and recycling of end-of-life products have changed the structure of supply chain networks, and the option of closed-loop supply chains gains popularity. Growing strict environmental and social legislations are expected to enhance sustainability of closed-loop supply chains. This study focuses on the pricing and advertising decisions in a closed-loop supply chain network. Although pricing decisions have been well-studied in this area, there is a little attention to advertising decisions. It is well-known that advertising plays a signifcant role in infuencing customer behavior in returning end-of-life products for the closed-loop supply chain. Therefore, this research develops an operational and tactical plan for promoting advertising programs considering different elasticity effects. As such, the proposed optimization plan considers the pricing decisions in a more compre- hensive view, where the price of similar products in the market and their substitution degree have a high impact on the proftability of manufacturers in a direct-sales closed-loop supply chain. Hence, the main novelty of this paper is to develop a new optimization model with pricing and advertising decisions in a direct-sales closed-loop supply chain. Since the proposed model is more complex than the majority of existing optimization models in the area of closed-loop supply chains, another novelty of this paper is to propose an improvement to the standard particle swarm optimization algorithm using the crowd-learning theory. The developed algorithm is validated by the exact solver and compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms in this research area. An extensive compu- tational experiment is performed considering a number of comparative metrics. The fndings show the superior performance of the proposed metaheuristic against the alternative solution approaches in terms of computational time and solution quality. Moreover, some important insights are obtained from this research, which could provide a basis for confguration of pricing schemes and advertising campaigns to improve the effciency of closed-loop supply chains. 1. Introduction Over the past few years, remanufacturing has been successfully practiced in different industries, including computers (Amin and Zhang, 2013), printer cartridges (Jian et al., 2020), cameras, tires (Fathollahi- Fard et al., 2021), car batteries, and other products (Asghari et al., 2014). Such a pattern can be explained by a resolution of supply chain networks based on the trend of sustainability (Gharfalkar et al., 2015) and growing awareness of the world’s resource scarcity (Hofmann et al., 2018). Traditionally, the products are either disposed to landflls or incinerated at the end of their useful life. However, disposal of end-of- life materials in nature is not environmentally sustainable. Hence, proper methodologies are required to simultaneously consider the consumer behavior and to mitigate the adverse effects of the existing practices in an environmental-friendly way (Silva et al., 2017). To accomplish this goal, the closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) confgura- tions and optimization models, which perfectly ft and solve the issue of remanufacturing systems, have received considerable attention over the * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mohammad.asghari@dal.ca (M. Asghari), hamid.afshari@dal.ca (H. Afshari), b.mirzapour@gmail.com (S.M.J. Mirzapour Al-e-hashem), amirmohammad.fathollahifard.1@ens.etsmtl.ca (A.M. Fathollahi-Fard), mdulebenets@eng.famu.fsu.edu (M.A. Dulebenets). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers & Industrial Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/caie https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cie.2022.108439 Received 16 October 2021; Received in revised form 7 May 2022; Accepted 6 July 2022