Unveiling coordination contracts’ roles considering circular economy and eco-innovation toward pharmaceutical supply chain resiliency: Evidence of an emerging economy

The integration of Circular Economy (CE) and Eco-Innovation (EI) principles flourished as a primary paradigm in Supply Chain Management (SCM) toward both sustainable growth and resiliency. Nonetheless, the challenges in paving the way for CE and EI-focused SCM are the most significant dilemma. Accordingly, this paper attempts to identify the most significant challenges with a case study on the pharmaceutical industry of Iran's emerging economy. Then provide a novel strategic guideline, which roots in the coordination mechanisms. Indeed, this is one of the first papers to provide in-depth insights into the interaction between coordination contracts and challenges of CE and EI-focused Pharmaceutical SCM (PSCM) towards sustainability and resilience fulfillment. To do so, a novel mixed method has been employed. First, a systematic literature review (SLR) has been applied to extract those challenges. Next, according to experts' views, the Fuzzy-Delphi method has been employed to screen the extracted challenges. Afterwards, a list of Game Theoretical Coordination Contracts (GTCCs) was identified via the second stream of literature review. Then, the fuzzy version of SECA (Simultaneous Evaluation of Criteria and Alternatives) has innovatively been developed to measure the finalized challenge weights and GTCC performance scores simultaneously. Eventually, GTCCs were clustered, and the results denoted that the diamond category, including cost-tariff, profit-sharing, cost-sharing, and revenue-sharing-commission, would be the appropriate mechanism for dealing with the inefficiency of Supply Chain (SC) main functions.