Research On Retailers’ Information Sharing Strategies Based On Marketing Investment Of Suppliers

With the globalization of the economy,the shorter life cycle of products and the diversification of product categories,the matching of supply and demand in supply chain operations is becoming more and more important.Demand uncertainty is one of the main factors affecting the decision-making and performance of supply chain systems,and it is also the main factor that causes supply and demand mismatch.The information asymmetry in the supply chain system makes the supply and demand mismatch problem more serious.Suppliers and retailers often accurately grasp the needs of consumers through information sharing,so that supply and demand can be matched well,so as to provide reasonable supply,production and product pricing,and improve consumer satisfaction.Therefore,information sharing is one of great significance way to improve the supply chain efficiency,and many scholars work on supply chain information sharing from different aspects.But most of the existing researches only consider the pricing decision,while advertising/promoting is one of the most important market factors that affect the demand for products.Moreover,the extant literature mainly focus on non-strategic information sharing,and there is not much research focus on strategic information sharing.Therefore,based on the existing research,this thesis considers the influence of retailer information sharing strategy on the decision-making and profit of upstream and downstream enterprises in the supply chain under different supply chain structure with supplier taking marketing initiative effort.The main contributions of this thesis are as following aspects:Firstly,in the actual operation of enterprises,enterprises establish information sharing protocols to communicate information before acquiring information.In view of this situation,a game theory is employed to analyze the demand information sharing problems of retailer in the single supplier-single retailer supply chain,and obtain the factor that drive the retailer to share the information voluntarily.The results shows that when suppliers’ marketing investments are more effective,retailers will sharing information voluntarily.Secondly,under the supply chain of competitive retailers,three different information sharing modes(horizontal/vertical/public)are established.The information sharing equilibrium of retailers under three different information sharing modes is studied separately.The results shows that the equilibrium of horizontal information sharing is to share demand information;when retailers post public information,the retailers’ information sharing equilibrium are affected by the effectiveness of suppliers’ marketing investment and the degree of market competition.Specifically,(1)when the effectiveness of supplier marketing investment is high,retailers will share information;(2)when the effectiveness of supplier marketing investment is medium and the degree of market competition is low,only one of the retailers will share information;(3)when the effectiveness of supplier marketing investment is medium and the market is highly competitive,both of the retailers will share information;(4)when effectiveness of supplier marketing investment is low,retailers will not actively share information.(5)When retailers sharing information vertically,only one of the retailer is willing to share information due to the existence of inference effect.Thirdly,the thesis considers the supply chain consisting of competitive suppliers-single retailer.The thesis analyzes the impact of the suppliers’ competitive marketing investment and the degree of market competition on the retailer’s demand information sharing equilibrium strategies.The results indicates that retailer shares demand information with at most one supplier.The retailer is willing to share information with one of the suppliers only if consumers are sufficiently sensitive to marketing investment and market competition is relatively intense.Fourthly,with the rapid development of Internet and e-commerce,online platforms become more and more common.In response to this situation,this thesis investigates a supply chain of competitive suppliers selling products through the same online platform,and obtains online platform’s information sharing equilibrium decision when the network platform has more accurate demand information.The results shows that the network platform is willing to share demand information with at least one of the suppliers.When consumers are sufficiently sensitive to the level of marketing investment,the online platform will only share information with one of the suppliers;otherwise,the online platform willing to share demand information with both of the suppliers.Finally,the retailer may encounter temporary demand information during the operation of the supply chain.After acquiring the information,according to the exact content of the information,the retailer strategically decides whether to share information and in what form(if the information sharing is decided)to other supply chain members.In response to this situation,this thesis exploits the retailer’s strategic demand information sharing under the single supply chain with supplier’s marketing investment decision.The results reveal that regardless of whether the information acquisition process is transparent or not,when consumers are sufficiently sensitive to the marketing investment of suppliers,the retailer will voluntarily share information with the supplier.Under certain conditions,information transparency may be harmful to the retailer and the supplier.