关键词: 批发价格契约, 信息泄露, 规模不经济, 不完全竞争, 信号博弈

Abstract: Firms confront uncertain demand because of technology development, seasonal change, and short life circle. With the continuous development of information technology, enterprises can transform consumption data into effective market demand information. To reduce the influence of demand uncertainty, retailers regularly collect market data to get information on product demand and share it with their partners. However, some firms are unwilling to share information with their suppliers knowing that they might provide products to the competitors for fear of leaking information. Previous literature suggests that suppliers always leak information under wholesale price contract. In order to deter information leakage and to promote information sharing, academic works try to design sophisticated contract to achieve this target. Although these complex contracts can prevent information leakage, in reality, simple wholesale price contracts are widely used in many industries. Furthermore, the contracts work in those academic papers assuming that the production cost is linear. However, production cost is nonlinear in most situations. Production diseconomy may occur when a manufacturer’s capacity is limited or the manufacturer simultaneously produces multi-products with limited material. So, does a manufacturer still leak information if production diseconomy exists under a wholesale price contract? If not, does the final information non-leakage equilibrium exist? What are the causes and internal mechanisms leading to this result? For anuninformed retailer, can it benefit from the non-leakage equilibrium?
   To address the above questions, this paper builds a model consisting of one manufacturer selling products to two retailers, one of whom has more private information on the market demand called incumbent retailer. The other retailer called entrant retailer competes with the incumbent retailer on sales quantity. The manufacturer may leak the incumbent retailer’s order information to the entrant retailer if the latter benefits the former. The dynamic multistage game is conducted with the following sequence of events. First, the incumbent retailer acquires demand information. Second, the manufacturer provides a wholesale contract to the retailers. Third, the incumbent retailer orders from the manufacturer. Fourth, the manufacturer gets the incumbent retailer’s order quantity and decides whether to leak it or not. Fifth, the entrant retailer orders from the manufacturer. If the manufacturer leaks information, the retailers are engaged in a sequential game; otherwise, they are engaged in a simultaneous move. Finally, the market demand is realized.
The result shows that when production diseconomy is at the middle level, the manufacturer’s choice of not disclosing information can guarantee a considerable order quantity in low demand situation, and avoid the high production costs caused by diseconomy in high demand situation. When the prior probability of high-demand is low and the demand fluctuation is small, the incumbent retailer can maintain higher sales price by ordering a non-leakage quantity. However, when the product substitutability is small and the gap between the high and low demand is large, the first mover advantage will be weakened. At this time, the incumbent retailer orders a non-leakage quantity to keep the value of demand information. As a result, comprehensively affected by incomplete substitutability, demand fluctuation, and sale of production diseconomy, non-leakage equilibrium exists under simple wholesale price contracts. The finding also shows that the entrant retailer can benefit from non-leakage equilibrium regardless of the high demand or low demand.

Key words: wholesale price contract, information leakage, production diseconomy, imperfect competition, signaling game