Research On Joint Decision-making Of Manufacturer's Information Acquisition And Quality Disclosure

From the perspective of the manufacturer,the paper studied the information asymmetry problem between the upstream manufacturer and the retailer in the supply chain.The manufacturer privately knows the quality of their products but is uncertain about the consumer preferences for the products they face.While the retailer knows the consumer preferences,she cannot accurately control the quality of products produced by the manufacturer.The information asymmetry seriously affects the total benefits of both parties and the supply chain.In order to solve the contradiction,the paper attempted to find the optimal decision-making plan and maximize the total supply chain from the perspective of joint decision-making between information acquisition and quality disclosure.The consideration of joint strategies will significantly affect the manufacturer's control on consumer preferences and the rational judgment of the retailer on product quality,which will ultimately affect the profits of both parties.The paper assumed that there is no competition in the market and the object included a manufacturer,a retailer and the same group of the consumer.The paper adopted the inverse game inference method,and regarded information acquisition and quality disclosure as a comprehensive decision-making process.In addition,the paper is the first one to analyze decision-making situations under two different consumer preferences distribution.Finally,it further validated the research results through numerical simulation.The paper found that the distribution of consumer preference and the information acquisition cost will have certain influence on the result.The difference is also affected by the quality disclosure cost and the preference difference coefficient value.At the same time,there is a non-monotonic relationship between the change in the consumer preference coefficient and the manufacturer's profits.Information acquisition can help the manufacturer better develop pricing and quality disclosure strategies,but it may also leak certain product information to retailer,helping the retailer better assess product quality.Therefore,in equilibrium,the manufacturer may not acquire any market-related information,although information acquisition does not require any cost.Finally,the cost of information acquisition and quality disclosure cannot be too high,and the impact of information acquisition cost on expected profits is particularly obvious.When the quality disclosure cost is high or low enough,it is beneficial for the manufacturer to choose information acquisition.When the disclosure cost is in the intermediate stage,non-acquisition dominants.