Incentive Mechanism On Customer Knowledge Cooperative Acquisition In Supply Chain

At present, with the development of knowledge-based economy, knowledge is increasingly becoming important resource of enterprises to maintain a competitive advantage and sustainable development. From the perspective of knowledge management, supply chain is not only closely related to information flow, capital flow supply chain, but also supply chain of knowledge. Customer knowledge, as an important resource in supply chain, is vital to hold customers, innovation and improving core competitive advantage for member enterprises even supply chain. However, customer knowledge flow smoothly between member corporations and its acquisition efficiency have been damaged by moral hazard caused by information asymmetry within cooperation mode. From above perspective, incentive problems of customer knowledge cooperative acquisition under supply chain are researched in this paper.Firstly, to research cooperative problem in customer knowledge collaborative acquisition for manufacturer and retailer, the characteristics of customer knowledge collaborative acquisition were analyzed and dynamic game models were constructed to research collaborative relationship and efficiency of customer knowledge acquisition in the manufacturer initiative mode and in the retailer initiative case. Important influence on the manufacturer's return and the retailer's return and the system return change with variety of the incurred coefficients of customer knowledge acquired and the effort elasticity coefficients. When the rigid conditions is satisfied, the optimal profits of manufacturer and retailer in the retailer initiative case are better than the manufacturer initiative case, as well as gains for the entire system. Furtherly, considering the participations'decising behaviors, analyzed the the dgree of involvement and its cressponding behaviors. Then, three game models such as manufacturer decision-making alone, semi-collaboration and centric decisiton-making were compared. The degree of distributor participation is not only affected by its own cost for the collaborative innovation, but also the investment of manufacturer. The boundary condition of different decision selection was obtained for manufacturer and its distributor.Secondly, based on above cooperative mode, double-sided moral hazard problem had been researched. Considering the difference characteristics of customer knowledge from other tangible products, an incentive mechanism was designed to smooth the moral hazard. In the process of customer knowledge collaborative acquisition information asymmetry between manufacturer and retailer leads to double-sided hazard problem that result in the decrease of their collaborative efficiency and customer knowledge acquisition performance. Therefore, we focus on contractual arrangements to solve this problem. First, based on double-sided moral hazard effects of different efforts and their coefficients of elasticity were considered to construct customer knowledge performance function. Then, cooperation contract was designed through building mathematic model with principle-agent theory. The results showed that the optimal revenue sharing rate of customer knowledge collaborative acquisition was not relative with the efforts and the cost-of-effort coefficient, while relative with effort-elasticity and exponents of cost-of-effort functions. The results also explored that the contract can give an incentive mechanism to decrease the double-sided moral hazard from manufacturer and retailer. A numerical example illuminated further the contract design and relationships between its variables.Tirdly, considering characteristics of customer knowledge acquisition to introduce knowledge stickness coeffients, incentive and efficiency between cooperative manufacturer and retailer are researched with the relational contract under double moral hazard. Based on the problem that the formal contract cannot incent simultaneously the effort of manufacturer and retailer, a relational cooperative contract is designed with principal-agent theory, then the incentive effect of the relational contract is analyzed. The conclusions indicate that manufacturer'revenue and system profit under the relational contract are not less than that under the formal contract for all discount rate; the incentive effect of the relational contract increases with the discount rate increasing. When the discount rate is large enough, the first best outcome can be achieved through the relational contract.