企业间信息共享的激励问题研究

Incentive Issues on Information Sharing between Firms

本文考虑了一个零售商占主导地位但制造商具有市场需求信息优势的二级供应链系统;具体来说,制造商具有确定的市场需求信息,而零售商对市场需求信息仅仅有一个随机先验分布。本文讨论的问题是,当零售商设计采购合同时,制造商是否有意愿去改善零售商的需求信息?如果可能,是否零售商提供的合同越复杂越能激励制造商这么做呢?本文的研究结果表明,(i)制造商希望零售商需求估计的均值(即信息趋势)尽可能地低。但是对于需求估计的方差(即信息精度),则存在一个临界值,低于这个值时,制造商希望零售商需求的方差越大越好;高于这个值时,制造商希望零售商需求的方差越小越好,这意味着制造商在某种程度上愿意与零售商共享信息;(ii)复杂的合同并不能提供更多的激励去促使制造商共享信息。本文的结论意味着需要设计新的机制去促使制造商能够诚实地披露他的私有信息。

This study considers a supply chain system with a dominant retailer purchasing a product from a manu- facturer, who has private superior knowledge about market demand, where the retailer＇ s market information esti- mate is modeled as a continuous random variable characterized by mean and variance. Under this setting, would the manufacturer be willing to improve the retailer＇ s imperfect knowledge when the retailer is designing her pur- chasing contract？ If possible, could a more sophisticated contract provide more incentives for the manufacturer to do so？ The results of this research show that： （i）The manufacturer wishes the mean of the retailer＇s estimate as low as possible, while there exists an interior point of variance that maximize the manufacturer＇ s profit： below the interior point, the manufacturer wishes the retailer have a higher variance; while above the interior point, the manufacturer wishes a lower variance from the retailer, which means the manufacturer is willing to share the in- formation with the retailer under certain conditions. （ii）There is no evidence that a more sophisticated contract can offer more incentives to the manufacturer to improve the information of the retailer. The results call for new contracts developed to induce the manufacturer to honestly reveal his private information.