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The rapid development of the Internet has led to an increasingly significant role for E-commerce business. This study examines how the green supply chain (GSC) operates on the E-commerce online channel (resell mode and agency mode) and the traditional offline channel with information sharing under demand uncertainty.

This study builds a multistage game model that considers the manufacturer selling green products through different channels. On the traditional offline channel, the competing retailers decide whether to share demand signals. Regarding the resale mode of E-commerce online channel, just E-tailer 1 determines whether to share information and decides the retail price. In the agency mode, the manufacturer decides the retail price directly, and E-tailer 2 sets the platform rate.

This study reveals that information accuracy is conducive to information value and profits on both channels. Interestingly, the platform fee rate in agency mode will inhibit the effect of a positive demand signal. Information sharing will cause double marginal effects, and price competition behavior will mitigate such effects. Additionally, when the platform fee rate is low, the manufacturer will select the E-commerce online channel for operation, but the retailers' profit is the highest in the traditional channel.

This research explores the interplay between different channel structures and information sharing in a GSC, considering price competition and demand uncertainty. Besides, we also considered what behaviors and factors will amplify or transfer the effect of double marginalization.

Different information sharing mechanisms and online platform information sharing to different charging models are compared and analyzed.

This paper uses the Stackelberg game model to study the demand information sharing and pricing decisions.

The results show that: (1) the retailer's pricing strategy is the highest when both of them obtain information, while the manufacturer's pricing strategy is affected by the related attributes of different products, such as the sensitivity of consumers to product prices; (2) in the online platform sales model, the demand information data sharing owned by the online platform can bring more expected profits to the whole supply chain and the members of the supply chain, and the higher the accuracy of the information, the higher the expected profit; (3) when the cost of obtaining demand information is zero, that is, the online platform shares the information data about market demand free of charge, the retailer and manufacturer tend to obtain information; (4) for the online platform, charging a certain fee can achieve higher expected profits than free sharing.

Based on the single platform online sales model, this paper uses the Stackelberg game model to study the demand information sharing and pricing decision of a manufacturer and a retailer selling products through the same online platform.

We explore the driving forces behind the channel choices of the manufacturer and the platform by considering asymmetric selling cost and demand information.

This paper develops game-theoretical models to study different channel strategies for an E-commerce supply chain, in which a manufacturer distributes products through a platform that may operate in either the marketplace channel or the reseller channel.

Three primary models are built and analyzed. The comparison results show that the platform would share demand information in the reseller channel only if the service cost performance is relatively high. Besides, with an increasing selling cost, the equilibrium channel might shift from the marketplace to the reseller. With increasing information accuracy, the manufacturer tends to select the marketplace channel, while the platform tends to select the reseller channel if the service cost performance is low and tends to select the marketplace channel otherwise.

All these results have been numerically verified in the experiments. At last, we also resort to numerical study and find that as the service cost performance increases, the equilibrium channel may shift from the reseller channel to the marketplace channel. These results provide managerial guidance to online platforms and manufacturers regarding strategic decisions on channel management.

Although prior research has paid extensive attention to the driving forces behind the online channel choice between marketplace and reseller, there is at present few study considering the case where a manufacturer selling through an online platform faces a demand information disadvantage in the reseller channel and sales inefficiency in the marketplace channel. To fill this research gap, our work illustrates the interaction between demand information asymmetry and selling cost asymmetry to identify the equilibrium channel strategy and provides useful managerial guidelines for both online platforms and manufacturers.

This paper aims to study the preferences of the supply chain (SC) members on various power structures under demand information asymmetry considering competing retailers.

A two-level SC with one manufacturer and two retailers is designed. The retailers are in Bertrand competition. The manufacturer who holds the confidential demand information chooses the appropriate information sharing (IS) format. Three IS formats are provided, i.e. no IS (the manufacturer never shares with the retailers), partial IS (the manufacturer shares with one retailer), full IS (the manufacturer shares with all retailers). In addition, the authors model two power structures based on the decision sequences in the SC, i.e. retailers or manufacturer-dominant SC. The authors characterize the equilibrium solutions and payoffs and then investigate the members’ preferences for IS formats.

It is shown that in retailers (manufacturer)-dominant SC, the retailers prefer full (no) IS, but the manufacturer prefers no (full) IS. Moreover, the authors analyze the members’ preferences on power structures under demand information asymmetry, which has a relationship with the degrees of demand uncertainty and competition intensity.

The analysis regarding the preferences of the SC members on power structure under demand information asymmetry provides valuable managerial insights to enhance cooperation and achieve a win-win result.

Drawing on absorptive capacity theory, this study explores the impacts of supply visibility and demand visibility on product innovation (i.e. exploratory and exploitative innovation), and it examines how supplier integration, customer integration and internal integration mediate these impacts.

The authors employ empirical survey data from 200 Chinese manufacturers and use structural equation modeling to test the proposed relationships.

The results show that supply visibility is positively related to supplier integration and internal integration and that demand visibility is positively related to customer integration. Furthermore, only customer integration and internal integration positively relate to exploratory and exploitative innovation.

First, this study emphasizes that supply visibility and demand visibility are important sources of a firm's innovation performance and that supply chain integration increases focal firms' capability of exploiting information and facilitates product innovation. Second, the study shows that supply visibility and demand visibility have distinct effects on three dimensions of supply chain integration and exploratory and exploitative innovation. The study also provides significant managerial guidelines for effectively leveraging supply chain visibility and integration in the promotion of product innovation.

It is widely known that fast-fashion retailers are struggling to keep up with consumer attention for quick responses within the fashion industry. With the advance of Internet and e-commerce, consumers prefer to purchase online. Online platform information has become an essential source for exploring consumer attention. However, there is often a mismatch between the information provided by retailers and the feedback received from consumers, leading to an imbalance between the supply side and demand side of online information. The purpose of this study is therefore to provide a unified approach to discover consumer attention from the design topic aspect by revealing the information imbalance between supply side and demand side.

To address the issue of online information imbalance and discover consumer attention, this study proposed an approach that focuses on the design topic perspective. The design topic is a collection of design elements that represent a clothing-design feature more comprehensively and accurately compared to a single design element. The proposed approach begins with generating design topics through topic modeling based on online information provided by retailers on e-commerce platforms. Two indicators, influence degree and attention degree, are then used to quantify the intensity of supply information and consumer attention related to design topics. Finally, design topic strategy diagrams are constructed to reveal information imbalance and discover consumer attention.

The experimental case demonstrates the existence of information imbalance, indicating that the intensity of supply information and consumer attention from the perspective of design topics is not uniform, although both follow the Pareto principle. The results of consumer attention distribution with heavy power-law tails are consistent with current research findings. This further demonstrates that the proposed approach is capable of discovering consumer attention in the design topic strategy diagrams.

The issue of information imbalance between retailers and consumers poses a challenge in keeping up with customer attention. The proposed approach offers a practical solution by visually identifying the symptoms of information imbalance and discovering consumer attention through design topic strategy diagrams. This approach provides fast-fashion retailers with a valuable reference to seize market opportunities, improve product design and adjust marketing or management strategies.

This study proposes a novel approach to disclose the issue of information imbalance between supply side and demand side and therefore to discover consumer attention from the perspective of design topics. In addition, guidelines for applying the proposed approach for fast-fashion marketing and management are presented.

In recent years, private brands for e-commerce platforms have experienced rapid growth. However, whether these platforms developing private brands should share their demand information with others and how such information sharing affects the sales format selection of national brand manufacturers have puzzled firm managers in practice. This paper aims to investigate the information-sharing strategy for the e-commerce platform and its influence on the sales format selection in the presence of the private brand.

The authors use a game-theoretical model to examine the interaction between the information-sharing strategy and sales format selection in a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a platform that operates a private brand.

The equilibrium results show that when the commission rate is low, the manufacturer favors agency selling, and the platform shares demand information with the manufacturer; when the commission rate is high, the manufacturer prefers reselling, and the platform does not share the information. This preference is affected by information forecasting accuracy; as the information forecasting accuracy increases, the manufacturer prefers to adopt agency selling, and the platform tends to share the information. Interestingly, under agency selling, sharing information with the manufacturer can increase the platform’s profit from selling the private brand and achieve a win-win situation for them. Furthermore, we show that the manufacturer can inspire the platform to share the information with himself by adopting agency selling, whereas the platform sharing the information improves the probability that the manufacturer adopts agency selling. Moreover, the manufacturer may have a first-mover advantage. In particular, the manufacturer moving first increases the likelihood that the manufacturer chooses agency selling and the platform shares the information.

This paper contributes to sales format literature by exploring the effect of information sharing strategy on sales format selection in the presence of the private brand and can help manufacturers and platforms to make suitable decisions regarding information sharing and sales format selection.

This paper studies the optimal decision-making and coordination problem of a dual-channel fresh agricultural product (FAP) supply chain. The purpose is to analyze the impact of information sharing on optimal decisions and propose a coordination mechanism to encourage supply chain members to share information.

The two-echelon dual-channel FAP supply chain includes a manufacturer and a retailer. By using the Stackelberg game theory and the backward induction method, the optimal decisions are obtained under information symmetry and asymmetry and the coordination contract is designed.

The results show that supply chain members should comprehensively evaluate the specific situation of product attributes, coefficient of freshness-keeping cost and network operating costs to make decisions. Asymmetric information can exacerbate the deviation of optimal decisions among supply chain members and information sharing is always beneficial to manufacturers but not to retailers. The improved revenue-sharing and cost-sharing contract is an effective coordination mechanism.

The conclusions can provide theoretical guidance for supply chain managers to deal with information asymmetry and improve the competitiveness of the supply chain.

This paper combines the three characteristics that are most closely related to the reality of supply chains, including horizontal and vertical competition of different channels, the perishable characteristics of FAPs and the uncertainty generated by asymmetric demand information.

This paper aims to propose a simulation-based performance evaluation model for the drone-based delivery of aid items to disaster-affected areas. The objective of the model is to perform analytical studies, evaluate the performance of drone delivery systems for humanitarian logistics and can support the decision-making on the operational design of the system – on where to locate drone take-off points and on assignment and scheduling of delivery tasks to drones.

This simulation model captures the dynamics and variabilities of the drone-based delivery system, including demand rates, location of demand points, time-dependent parameters and possible failures of drones’ operations. An optimization model integrated with the simulation system can update the optimality of drones’ schedules and delivery assignments.

An extensive set of experiments was performed to evaluate alternative strategies to demonstrate the effectiveness for the proposed optimization/simulation system. In the first set of experiments, the authors use the simulation-based evaluation tool for a case study for Central Florida. The goal of this set of experiments is to show how the proposed system can be used for decision-making and decision-support. The second set of experiments presents a series of numerical studies for a set of randomly generated instances.

The goal is to develop a simulation system that can allow one to evaluate performance of drone-based delivery systems, accounting for the uncertainties through simulations of real-life drone delivery flights. The proposed simulation model captures the variations in different system parameters, including interval of updating the system after receiving new information, demand parameters: the demand rate and their spatial distribution (i.e. their locations), service time parameters: travel times, setup and loading times, payload drop-off times and repair times and drone energy level: battery’s energy is impacted and requires battery change/recharging while flying.

Eco-innovation products, which means achieving more efficient and responsible use of resources and reducing the detrimental impact on the environment, can win a competitive advantage for the enterprises. But it is not easy to implement due to the high cost of eco-innovative technologies development, the uncertainty of market needs and return risk of investment. Many enterprises seek collaborations from their upstream suppliers to jointly carry out eco-innovation, such as Apple, IBM and Nike. A unique feature of collaboration is that efforts by one party enhance the marginal value of the other party's efforts. However, the collaboration will make the partner know the eco-innovation technology and prompt the partner to encroach the market to sell competitive products by herself. Motivated by this observation, this paper considers the optimal collaboration strategy on eco-innovation between upstream and downstream supply chain member and the optimal encroachment strategy of upstream supplier in a supply chain.

This paper models a supply chain wherein a supplier provides products or materials for her manufacturer and cooperates with her manufacturer in eco-innovation. Also, the supplier could encroach on the market to sell similar products by herself. Then this paper uses game theory and mathematical modeling to do relative analysis.

The analysis reveals several interesting insights. First, eco-innovation collaboration makes supplier encroachment no longer only rely on the encroachment cost. The delayed realized eco-innovation efficiency information also plays a vital role. Second, different from previous research, the authors find the manufacturer's preference for supplier encroachment depends on the uncertainty of eco-innovation efficiency and potential market demand. Third, both partial and full encroachment strategies of the supplier can effectively improve the eco-innovation level.

The paper is the first to take the interplay between collaboration and encroachment into account in a supply chain. The results caution enterprises and policymakers to take vertical collaboration and delayed realized information into account in the competitive supply chain before making any operational decisions. Furthermore, the authors propose that governmental intervention aimed at stimulating supplier encroachment in appropriate circumstances can contribute to the improved environmental performance of products.