Research On Governance Of Demand Information Leakage In Supply Chain

The information in the supply chain,including the forecast of market demand,cost and inventory of participants,order quantity of products and market price,etc.,is valuable to the interests of supply chain participants and the overall performance of the supply chain.If the information in the supply chain is reasonably shared,the whole supply chain can benefit.However,information leakage always plays a negative role in the cooperation and information sharing of a supply chain.It is important for us to mitigate the adverse effects of information leakage.We mainly study the information leakage of supplier.In this information leakage problem,supplier mainly discloses the market demand information held by retailer.Vertical information sharing between supplier and retailer is previously closed.However,if the retailer has potential competitors,the supplier is likely to disclose the retailer’s demand information to its competitors in order to expand the supply market and benefit from it.So we consider a stylized supply chain with one supplier selling to two competing retailers,one of whom has private information about uncertain market demand and order first,we call it incumbent retailer.The ordering information may be leaked to the uninformed retailer(we call it entrant retailer)by the supplier to make a higher profit.So the incumbent is given a chance to revise his order quantity after the entrant has ordered.We find that the revisable ordering strategy makes it possible for preventing the supplier from leaking his order information under some certain circumstances.Meanwhile,we use Game Theory to demonstrate that the informed retailer is likely to realize higher profits from the revisable ordering strategy even when his information gets leaked.Moreover,because of the chance to revise the order quantity,mimicking ordering is available to the informed retailer for concealing his true demand information to the supplier under leakage.At the same time,we propose that supply chain contract can also restrict the information leakage behavior of supplier.If the supplier give appropriate contracts to the incumbent retailer and the entrant retailer respectively,it can also prevent the occurrence of supplier information leakage under certain conditions.In comparison of the two strategies,we find that in most cases,the revisable ordering strategy is more effective to solve the information leakage problem of supplier.