Information Asymmetry And Information Sharing Incentive In Supply Chain Based On Third Party Logistics

The drastic market competition compels enterprises in supply chains to enhance not only the internal core competitiveness, but also the supply chain coordination capacity, which means more communication and more cooperation with partners. The increase of core competitiveness makes logistics outsourcing is the first choice of most manufacturers. At the same time, it increases coordination workload and gets rise to the new coordination problems in supply chain management.Aiming at solving the new problems in supply chain coordination with logistics outsourcing, this dissertation tries to find out some new methods based on the new changes in communication and information sharing brought by the introduction of a third-party logistics provider (3PLs). Therefore, information asymmetry and information sharing incentive in supply chain based on third party logistics are main subjects in this dissertation.First, the evolution of supply chain coordination is reviewed, and the influences that logistics outsourcing and third-party logistics brought to supply chain coordination are outlined. Then, the research achievements of the relationship between information sharing and coordination, information asymmetry and principle agent are summarized. The framework of the dissertation are established.Second,the model of Supply Chain Based on Third Part Logistic (SCBTPL) and the two-step Venn model are developed. Area and features of sharing information in supply chain are analyzed. The basic dimensionality model is also given, and features of sharing information are analyzed with the model.Third, information acquest and cognition are distinguished to establish the information cognition level model in mathematics. From the information cognition point of view, the information asymmetry and degree of information asymmetry are modeled mathematically on the general cognition level and attribution cognition. It lays a theoretical foundation for measurement of information asymmetry. Case study is conducted to demonstrate the influences of different information sharing modes on information asymmetry and degree of information asymmetry.Forth, a two-step model of SCBTPL is presented to discuss the triangular relationship among a supplier, a manufacturer and a third-party logistics provider. On the base of this model, it proves the existence of several information asymmetries in logistics outsourcing principle- agent relationship, which are result information asymmetry, multi-lateral information asymmetry and process information asymmetry.Researches on the principle-agent problem in logistics outsourcing of the two-step model in SCBTPL prove that because of the existence of result information asymmetry and multi-lateral information asymmetry, the collaborator has large influence on the logistics outsourcing. Therefore, the outsourcer has to consider profits of the third party logistics in the incentive contracts. According to relations among the multi-principles, multi-principle-agents could be classified into two kinds of principle-agent, the independent and the correlated. The corresponding mathematics models are also built to discuss the incentive mechanisms of principle to 3PLs under circumstance of result information sharing or not sharing between the principle and agent. Furthermore, information-sharing factors are introduced to the model to study the influence of different information sharing level on incentive mechanism design for logistics outsourcing contracts. The results verify whether how incomplete is for any additional information on action of agent, the interest can be both increased for the principles and the agent.An information-sharing model of SCBTPL is investigated. The three types of information sharing modes are designed. Five types of structure are analyzed, and a case is given.The research works is summarized, the further research issues of supply chain coordination based on the third party logistics is proposed at the end of the dissertation.