关键词: 平台供应链, 物流服务, 代理销售, 入驻合同, 信号博弈

Abstract: In real e-commerce environments, transaction data is recorded in the database of e-commerce platforms. Thus, the ownership of data makes platforms have information advantages over upstream manufacturers. Utilizing this advantage, platforms can finely configure logistics resources, thereby improving the level of logistics services. When entering the platform’s agent sales mode, manufacturers should consider whether to use a platform’s logistics service given that large platforms such as JD and Amazon have built their own logistics networks. In common, the effect of logistics service on market demand is privately known by the platform. When manufacturers are uninformed about the logistics service effectiveness of the platform, they cannot correctly make a decision, which in turn, affects the platform’s payoff. Thus, the platform has an incentive to signal its private information to manufacturers. However, only when the platform makes its decision before manufacturers can this signaling take effects. That is, the platform’s signaling depends on manufacturers’ entry contracts that lead to different decision sequences. Based on the above background, this paper considers a supply chain composed of a manufacturer and an e-commerce platform wherein the logistics service effectiveness is private information of the platform, and investigates whether the manufacturer employs the platform’s logistics service or not and how this decision affects the service effort of the platform and the profits of the two players. The existing literature about logistics employment problem mainly focuses on the symmetric information setting rather than the asymmetric information setting. The asymmetric information literature about platform selling does not investigate the logistics employment of the manufacturer. Therefore, this study explores a realistic situation in which the platform has private effectiveness information and the resulting findings can theoretically guide manufactures’ entry contract choice and platforms’ service provision.
A game or optimization model is established under the scenarios of adopting platform logistics or not doing so. If the manufacturer adopts the platform’s logistics service, that is, the entry contract of Fulfillment By plan of open Platform (FBP), the platform first sets the service level and then the manufacturer determines the retail price. In this FBP scenario, the platform charges the manufacturer a logistics service fee and a commission fee for each sale. Thus, the platform can use service level as an instrument to signal its effectiveness to the manufacturer. If the manufacturer does not adopt the platform’s logistics service, that is, the entry contract of Sales on plan of Open Platform (SOP), the manufacturer determines the retail price and the platform only charges the manufacturer the commission fee. The perfect Bayesian equilibrium and backward induction methods are used to solve the model. The decision-makings and profits of the two members under different scenarios are compared and analyzed.
The results show that, when the logistics service effectiveness is the supply chain members’ public information, in the SOP contract, the commission rate has no impact on optimal pricing and only plays a role in profit distribution. However, in the FBP contract, the retail price and logistics service level first increase and then decrease with the commission rate. When the logistics service effectiveness is the platform’s private information, in the FBP contract, a high-effectiveness platform will have an incentive to mimic a low-effectiveness platform, and thus the low-effectiveness platform must signal its information to the manufacturer through service level as an instrument. When the difference between the two effectiveness types is high, the separation of the platform will be costless; when the difference is moderate, the low-type platform must downward distort its service level to achieve a separation, and as the effectiveness gap decreases, the low-type platform’s separating cost will increase; when the difference continues to decrease (when it is small enough), the separating cost of the low-type platform will be greater than the loss caused by the high-type platform’s mimicking, and therefore the e-commerce platform will give up the separation and achieve pooling equilibrium. Moreover, when the commission fee is low, the manufacturer choosing platform logistics can achieve a win-win outcome with the platform.

Key words: platform supply chain, logistics service, agency selling, entry contract, signaling game