Competitive collection with convenience-perceived customers

• Competitive collectors invest in collection service to attract customers perceiving convenience. • Remanufacturing and recycling of wasted products are simultaneously investigated. • Channel discrimination and collection convenience jointly drive the competitive collection. • A less competitive collection market increases remanufacturing rate but decreases recycling rate. Competitive collection affects the remanufacturing and recycling of end-of-life products, and collectors competitively invest in improving channel convenience to attract customers to return such products. We propose a closed-loop supply chain model consisting of one manufacturer and one third-party collector to investigate competitive collection and channel convenience. With the comparison of monopolistic and competitive scenarios, we find that channel discrimination and collection convenience drive the competitive collection. Specifically, extreme channel discrimination reduces competitive collection, whereas, with reasonable channel discrimination, a more competitive market has a higher collection convenience level. In the market, customers who are less sensitive to the selling price prefer a more competitive collection market, since a competitive market can better reduce selling prices thanks to a remanufacturing benefit. Our model reveals important insights about how competitive collection and channel convenience drive the remanufacturing and recycling to be more sustainable.