Online Platform's Ex-ante/Ex-post Information Sharing Strategy Considering Joint Pricing and Quality Decision
With the advancement of information technology,online platforms can efficiently collect and analyze rich market data,such as customers'browsing history and sales data,to obtain information about product demand.These data play a vital role in predicting consumers'purchasing behavior and market demand.Online platforms can better establish a recommendation system to match products to each customer with advanced infor-mation technology and professional data analysis tools.Simultaneously,suppliers can take advantage of these data to make better operations decisions.However,suppliers must rely on platforms for demand information owing to the lack of detailed data and related analysis tools.In practice,an increasing number of consumers are concerned about product prices and product quality levels,and many consumers are willing to pay for high-quality products even if they are charged a higher price.Additionally,according to the time of obtaining product demand information,information sharing can be divided into ex-post and ex-ante information sharing.Specifically,ex-post information sharing means that the platforms share information with suppliers after obtaining real market demand information.Ex-ante information sharing means that the platforms and suppliers reach infor-mation sharing agreement in advance,and then share demand information after observing it.Inspired by the practice,considering quality decisions,is it necessary for online platforms that have massive market demand information to share the demand information with their partners?Under the reselling mode and agency mode,how do platforms make ex-post and ex-ante information sharing decisions?To address these issues,we develop a game-theoretic model consisting of an online platform and a supplier to investigate platform's ex-post and ex-ante information sharing strategies under reselling mode and agency mode,respectively.Our main results suggest that:(i)The market demand uncertainty and the product quality cost coeffi-cient are the key factors influencing the choice of ex-post information sharing by the platform.(ii)Under the resell-ing mode,when the quality cost coefficient is small,the platform will choose ex-ante information sharing;while under the agency mode,the platform is always willing to share demand information with supplier.(iii)In both reselling and agency mode,ex-ante information sharing is always good for the supplier.Specially,ex-ante informa-tion sharing can lead to a win-win outcome under the agency mode.However,ex-post information sharing may hurt the supplier.Moreover,the supplier with the ability to change product quality can encourage the platform to share information,which can not only better meet the needs of consumers,but also improve the profits of the platform and supplier.And then,the platform should formulate information sharing strategy according to different selling modes,product types,and the impact of different information sharing strategy on the supplier.Our model has several directions that merit discussion and future research.First,we implicitly assume that the online platform can perfectly forecast demand potential.In practice,the retailer might only obtain a vague signal about market demand.Thus,it would be interesting to study whether the platform should share information with the supplier at a specific accuracy level.Second,we focus on determining whether the platform would share truthful information with the supplier.Another possibility would be to investigate the impact of cheap talk on the platform's information sharing and the retailer's selling mode selection.Finally,we only build a supply chain consisting of one supplier and one online platform.In the future,we can build a supply chain containing multiple suppliers or multiple online platforms.
ex-post/ex-ante information sharingreselling modelagency selling modelproduct qualitye-commerce supply chain
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