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This paper mainly focuses on how to induce all members to represent members' true preferences for supply and demand matching of E-commerce platform in order to generate stable matching schemes with more social welfare of Multi-agent Matching Platform (MMP) and individually stable advantages than traditional methods.

An MMP is designed. Meanwhile, a true preference inducing method, Lower-Bid Ranking (LBR), is proposed to reduce the number of false preferences, which is helpful to solve the problem that too much false preferences leads to low efficiency of platform operation and supply and demand matching. Then, a systematic model of LBR-based Stable Matching (SM-LBR) is proposed.

To obtain an ideal transaction partner, the adequate preference ordering and modifying according to market environment is needed for everyone, and the platform should give full play to the platforms' information advantages and process historical transaction and cooperation data. Meanwhile, the appropriate supply and demand matching is beneficial to improve the efficiency and quality of platform operation, and the design of matching guidance mechanism is essential.

The numerical experiments show that, the proposed model (SM-LBR) can induce members to represent the model's true preferences for stable matching and generate effective matchings with more social welfare of MMP and individually stable advantages than traditional methods, which may provide necessary method and model reference for the research of stable matching and E-commerce platform operation.

The paper attempts to discuss the impact of reference price effect on pricing decisions.

With the growth of the Internet and e-commerce, more and more customers purchase products in through online channels and choose products by comparing different prices and services, and the reference price effect has an impact on pricing decisions. To investigate the impact of consumers' reference price effect on the dual-channel supply chain, the authors establish a basic model consisting of a single dominant manufacturer and a single downstream retailer, and analyze the optional decisions under different situations and discuss the influence of reference price effect. Finally, a number case verifies the validity and rationality of the proposed model.

The results show that (1) the reference price effect has varying effects on the price, channel demand and income of manufacturers and retailers in the channel depending on the role of customers' channel preferences. (2) The manufacturer's online channel demand and profits always increase with the reference pricing effect, whereas the retailer's offline demand and profits always decline. (3) When the proportion of consumers preferring offline is higher, the manufacturer's network price and wholesale price increase with the reference price effect, while the retailer's retail price decreases with the reference price effect; when the proportion of consumers preferring offline is lower, the opposite is true, and the centralized decision results are consistent with the decentralized decision results.

This paper can clarify the impact of consumer reference price effects on the operation of dual-channel supply chains, and help inform pricing decisions of manufacturers and retailers in dual-channel supply chains.

The proposed approach can well analyze the impact of consumer reference price effect and give channel their optional decisions.

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.

Motivated by the real-world practice of the thriving e-commerce, manufacturers are transcending traditional boundaries of merely producing and selling directly by implementing encroachment. Concurrently, supply chain (SC) members who overlook the corporate social responsibility (CSR) sharing will be left behind, which is closely linked to their profits. This paper aims to investigate a better way to share CSR under the scenarios of manufacturer encroachment and no-encroachment.

This paper constructs game-theoretic models in a SC consisting of a manufacturer (M) and a retailer (R), where the manufacturer can sell products by retailing, and may sell directly by implicating encroachment. The manufacturer and retailer jointly consider whether to share CSR and the proportion of it by taking consumer surplus into account. Furthermore, equilibriums for each model are derived using backward induction. Then, the authors analyse the impact of CSR sharing proportion and compare the equilibrium outcomes under different scenarios. Finally, the numerical analyses are presented to verify the results.

Several interesting results are found in this paper. First, the retailer shares more CSR can benefit SC members and social welfare when the manufacturer does not implement encroachment. However, the results may change which is decided by the unit cost of encroachment when the manufacturer does so. Second, the proportion of CSR shared by manufacturer and the unit cost of encroachment has an interactive impact on equilibrium outcomes. Finally, both manufacturer encroachment and SC members share CSR may be the best for the perspective of SC members and consumers.

Based on the analytical results, this paper provides novel managerial implications to assist manufacturer and retailer in determining the optimal strategies for CSR sharing and encroachment. Furthermore, the appropriate proportion of CSR shared by manufacturer and the unit cost of encroachment may let manufacturer, retailer and consumer surplus achieve a win-win-win situation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to explore the strategy of CSR sharing under the scenarios of manufacturer encroachment and no-encroachment.

In this study, a dynamic contracting model is developed between a venture capitalist (VC) and an entrepreneur (EN) to explore the influence of asymmetric beliefs regarding output-relevant parameters, agency conflicts and complementarity on the VC's posterior beliefs through the EN's unobservable effort choices to influence the optimal dynamic contract.

The authors construct the contracting model by incorporating the VC's effort, which is ignored in most studies. Using backward induction and a discrete-time approximation approach, the authors solve the continuous-time contract design problem, which evolves into a nonlinear ordinary differential equation (ODE).

The optimal equity share that the VC provides to the EN decreases over time. In accordance with the empirical evidence, the EN's optimistic beliefs regarding the project's profitability positively affect its equity share. However, the interactions between the optimal equity share, project risk and both partners' degrees of risk aversion are not monotonic. Moreover, the authors find that the optimal equity share increases with the degree of complementarity, which indicates that the EN is willing to cooperate with the VC. This study’s results also show that the optimal equity shares at each time are interdependent if the VC is risk-averse and independent if the VC is risk-neutral.

In conclusion, the authors highlight two potential directions for future research. First, the authors only considered a single VC, whereas in practice, a risk project may be carried out by multiple VCs, and it is interesting to discuss how the degree of complementarity affects the number of VCs that ENs contract. Second, the authors may introduce jumps and consider more general multivariate stochastic volatility models for output dynamics and analyze the characteristics of the optimal contracts. Third, further research can deal with other forms of discretionary output functions concerning complementarity, such as Cobb–Douglas and constant elasticity of substitution (See Varian, 1992).

The results of this study have several implications. First, it offers a novel approach to designing dynamic contracts that are specific and easy to operate. To improve the complicated venture investment situation and abate conflict between contractual parties, this study plays a good reference role. Second, the synergy effect proposed in this study provides a theoretical explanation for the executive compensation puzzle in economics, in which managers are often “rewarded for luck” (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2001; Wu et al., 2018). This result indicates a realistic perspective on financing and establishing cooperative relationships, which enhances the efficiency of venture investment. Third, from an empirical standpoint, one can apply this framework to study research and development (R&D) problems.

First, the authors introduce asymmetric beliefs and Bayesian learning to study the dynamic contract design problem and discuss their effects on equity share. Second, the authors incorporate the VC's effort into the contracting problem, and analyze the synergistic effect of effort complementarity on the optimal dynamic contract.

It is necessary to implement green supply chains. But green development needs to be gradual and coexist with ordinary products in the market. This paper aims to study the green and ordinary product pricing and green decision-making under chain-to-chain competition.

This paper considers consumers' multiple preferences and takes two competitive supply chains with asymmetric channels as the research object. Through the construction of the game models involving different competitive situations, this paper studies the pricing, green decision-making and the supply chains' profits, and discusses the impact of consumer green preference, channel preference, green investment and competition on the decision-making and performance. Finally, this paper further studies the impact of the decision structure on the environmental and economic benefits of supply chains.

The results show that consumer green preference has an incentive effect on the green supply chain and also provides an opportunity for the regular supply chain to increase revenue. Specifically, consumers' preference for green online channels improves the product greenness, but its impact on the green retailer and regular supply chain depends on the green investment cost. Moreover, competition not only fosters product sustainability, but also improves supply chain performance. This paper also points out that the decentralization of the regular supply chain is conducive to the environmental attributes of the green product, while the environment-friendly structure of the green supply chain is different under different conditions. In addition, the profit of a supply chain under centralized decision is not always higher than that under decentralized decision.

The novelty of this paper is that it investigates the pricing of two heterogeneous alternative products and green decision-making for the green product under the competition between two supply chains with asymmetric channels, in which the green supply chain adopts dual channels and the regular supply chain adopts a single retail channel.

Contract Manufacturers (CM, factory) can cultivate factory brand products by imitating Original Equipment Manufacturers' (OEM, brand owner) National Brand products, and compete with OEM through the online retailer, that is, factory encroachment. In practice, few consumers can identify the quality of those two products in the online market. Implementing blockchain technology (BTI) can help all consumers identify product quality but may change the operation decisions and incur implementation costs. This study aims to explore how will the BTI strategies affect participants' operation performance under the factory encroachment and delve into the decisions regarding NB product quality and CM encroachment.

This study constructs a three-level outsourcing supply chain comprising one contract manufacturer (CM, factory), one original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and one online retailer. By utilizing the Stackelberg game, the authors first compared the results between two strategic decisions of BTI and no-BTI by online retailers under the factory encroachment scenario. Then, the NB product quality decision and the CM's encroachment decision are also investigated.

BTI strategy can benefit all participants (triple win), which both occurs in exogenous and endogenous quality cases, and the triple win area will expand (shrink) as the BTI cost decreases (increases). In addition, the OEM will improve product quality to confront competition from the CM, and the OEM may not always benefit from the BTI, it depends on the maturity of the market. Interestingly, BTI could improve the consumer surplus when the proportion of novice consumers is low. Finally, this study also investigates the extended case that CM always encroaches into the market whether the online retailer choose BTI or not, which hurts OEM's profit and decreases the product quality.

This study sheds light on the strategic decisions of online retailers' BTI regarding supply chain members' profits, consumer surplus and social welfare under factory encroachment. It also demonstrates that the BTI strategy, under different quality decisions (endogenous and exogenous), can be more profitable for chain members and consumers.

This study was conducted to achieve the following objectives: (1) determine the differences and reasons for using outgroup OSNs by gender, age and student groups (Mainland and Hong Kong [HK] students); (2) uncover the impact of online social networks (OSNs) on the development of Mainland–HK friendships and (3) determine the roles of different OSNs (social networking sites [SNSs] and instant messaging platforms [IMPs]) in the development of intercultural friendships in the real world.

To explore how OSNs facilitate (or inhibit) intercultural interactions, 198 students completed a questionnaire and 24 students participated in follow-up semi-structured interviews examining the role of OSNs in intercultural friendship development.

Results revealed that demographic and motivational preferences for using outgroup-OSNs differed among students. Both IMPs and SNSs helped students maintain friendships using little effort, whereas it tended to strengthen their existing social networks, rather than helping to start new friendships. IMPs helped develop a sense of “presence awareness”, strengthening pre-existing friendships and solidifying offline connections. SNSs also assisted students in exploring their shared interests while revealing their values and cultural differences.

The authors’ findings offered empirical evidence on social exchange theory and anxiety-uncertainty management theory regarding the perceived benefit of OSNs on students' friendship development.

The study sheds light on the differences between Mainland Chinese and HK students, including participants' perceptions of different friendship stages.

This study is interested in the roles of different SNSs and IMPs in intercultural friendship development, especially their strengths and weaknesses as perceived by students. Also, the authors are curious about how students select and use IMPs and SNSs differently according to their individual preferences and needs. To the authors’ knowledge, the dynamic link between online communication and intercultural friendship development has not been thoroughly examined in the field of intercultural communication.

People usually try to avoid uncertainty. Recently, however, uncertainty has become an emerging marketing tool in the hedonic product industry. In the case of blind box consumption, for example, the consumers become addicted to the uncertainty created by businesses, leading to repeat purchases and even indulgences. Previous research has, yet, to focus on the impact of uncertainty on indulgence and the role of emotions.

This paper constructs and validates a chain mediation model of uncertainty triggering indulgent consumption based on the information gap theory, positive emotion theory and uncertainty resolution theory and examines the difference between resolved and unresolved uncertainty. This study also explores differences in the impact of whether uncertainty is resolved on emotions. The uncertainty-resolved group elicited a more positive emotional response than the uncertainty-unresolved group, leading to a more indulgent consumption.

The results of three studies show that uncertainty influences indulgent consumption through curiosity and positive emotion, and that curiosity and positive emotion play separate and chain mediating roles between uncertainty and indulgent consumption, respectively. We validate our central hypothesis with questionnaires among blind box consumer groups, examining the moderating role of perceived luck and risk preferences.

The findings shed new light on firms' use of uncertainty to promote consumer purchases.