Product Quality And Market Demand Enhancement Strategies In A Supply Chain With Supply-Demand Information Uncertainty

With intensified market competition and rapid change of consumer preference,firms need to invest on new technology to improve product quality,reduce the product's life cycle,and to promotely response to the change of market conditions.However,the investment on new technology would also make the developemnet and promotion of new product more vulunerable,leading to the fluctuation of product quality in the supply side.On the other hand,in such a highly competitive environment,the vast random factors like consumer preference,demand condition would also result in some negative consequences on the overall performance of supply chain.In particular,with the vairbility and individuation of cosnumer preference and purchasing behavior,it is really difficult for the firm to match the new product's position with the demand conidtion.Thus,the fluctuation of demand information and the development of new information technology bring both new challenges and opportunities to the retailer.This dissertation focuses on the two-sided(supply-demand)information uncertainty during the new product promotion process and considers three important operational strategies: manufacturer's quality enhancement,retailer's sales effort investment and demand information acquisition.I investigte the strategic interactions among these strategies and identify how different strategies could influence the indivitual profitability and supply chain performance,by applying a series of methodologies including Operation Management,Information Economics,Behavioral Economics,Game Theory,Theoretical Research and Empiritical Research,Qualitative Analysis and Quantitative Analysis.The main contents of this dissertation are as follows.First,I construct a two-layer supply chain setting with supply information uncertainty and inverstigate the joint manufacturer's quality enhancement and retailer's sales effort strategies.I consider two possible timing of retailer's sales effort decisions: early commitment and delay commitment,depending on whether the retailer would commit its investment on sales effort before or after observing the manufacturer's quality enhancment decision.I derive the firms' optimal quality enhancement and sales effort commitment strategis under two different timing scenarios.Based on this,I further examine the impact of decision timing on the firms' and supply chain's payoffs,by comparing their performances under two representative scenarios.I finally discuss how the supply uncertainty could influence the levels of quality enhance and sales effort in the supply chain,so as to uncover the strategic interactions between manufacture's quality enhancement and retailer's sales effort strategies.Second,I construct a two-layer supply chain setting with demand information uncertainty and consider two different acquisition strategies from the retailer: commited acquisition that the retailer acquires demand information before the manufacturer sets it quality level and contingent acquisition that the retailer acquires demand information after the manufacturer sets its quality level.I investigate the manufacturer's optimal quality enhancement and retailer's optimal information acquisition strategies under different timing scenarios,and how the change of decision timing influence the firms' equilibirum strategies and supply chain's performance.Moreover,I identify the manufacturer's,retailer's and the supply chain's performances over differnet acquisition timings.The results in this part can uncover the strategic impact of retailer's information acquistion strategy on the manufacturer's optimal investment on product quality.Finally,based on the above two representative game settings,I introduce cost-sharing mechanism and investigate supply chain's coordination strategy with two-sided information uncertainty.I build two cost-sharing models wherein the manufacturer can voluntarily decide in what extent to share the cost of retailer's sales effort and information acquisition investment.I will show how the cost-sharing mechanism can improve retailer's sales effort and information acquisition strategies.Moreover,I will identify the impact of cost-sharing mechanism on the firms' and supply chain's profitability under differnet timing scenarios.