Abstract: The Internet and e-commerce have been developing rapidly, which motivates manufacturers to introduce their own direct selling channels. There is a large body of research that investigates manufacturer's channel operations strategy, but few studies examine retailers' coping strategy under encroachment. Due to the retailers' advantage in collecting consumer information, we study and put forward the optimal information acquisition strategy for the retailer facing encroachment. Considering the retailer's flexibility in information acquisition timing, we focus on two formats, namely committed acquisition and contingent acquisition, depending on whether the retailer commits to her acquisition decision before or after the manufacturer's quality investment. With contingent acquisition, the manufacturer first makes his product quality decision and then the retailer proceeds with her information acquisition decision. By contrast, with committed acquisition, the retailer moves first and decides whether to acquire information, and then the manufacturer invests in the product quality. Then, we investigate the manufacturer's product quality decision and selling decision. In this study, we not only offer theoretical guidance for retailers to cope with encroachment, but also provide references for improving product quality and consumer's expected utility. The results can be summarized as follows. First, the selling decisions of both the retailer and the manufacturer are affected by consumers' preference and the manufacturer's efficiency in direct selling. In particular, when consumers' quality preference is low and direct sales efficiency is not high, there will be no sales in the manufacturer's direct channel. However, when the manufacturer is efficient in direct selling, the retailer will be squeezed out of the reselling channel (i.e., there will be no sales in the reselling channel). When the consumers' quality preference is relatively high, the manufacturer will sell in both channels. Second, direct sales efficiency will affect the manufacturer's sales decision and the product quality decisions. When direct sales efficiency is high, the manufacturer improves product quality in the product development stage to set a higher direct sales price. When the manufacturer is less efficient in direct selling, the manufacturer will reduce or even give up sales on the direct sales channel and charge higher wholesale prices in the reselling channel by improving product quality. Third, in the face of the channel competition, the retailer can adopt the following information acquisition strategies: when manufacturer's direct sales efficiency is high, the retailer commits to acquire information to encourage manufacturers to improve product quality. When the direct selling efficiency is moderate, contingent acquisition is always a weakly dominant strategy. When the direct selling efficiency is low, the competition effect of direct selling channels is small, the retailer will make his information acquisition decision depending on the fixed cost of information acquisition. Specifically, when the cost of information acquisition is low, the retailer will adopt contingent acquisition to induce manufacturers to improve product quality. When the cost of information acquisition is relatively high and the direct sales efficiency is very low, realizing that the manufacturer has no motivation to improve quality, the retailer will adopt committed acquisition to encourage the manufacturer to enhance quality.
Our study is also subject to some limitations and various related directions can be explored in future research. First, our analysis is constructed on the assumption that consumers can accurately perceive product quality. In fact, if the manufacturer does not disclose any information about a newly developed product, the product properties will be usually difficult to be observed before the use phase. Hence, the manufacturer's quality disclosure strategy is worthy of further study. Second, it is worth mentioning that all the analyses in this paper are under the dual-channel configuration, and the manufacturer's encroachment decision, i.e., whether to build up a direct channel or not, can be a good candidate for future exploration. In addition, although the upstream firms' incentive for encroachment has been widely studied, it is still interesting to investigate the retailer's optimal information strategy under the potential encroachment. Last but not least, we bypass the unit production cost to capture the industries where the quality investment cost is high but the production cost is extremely low. However, in some other industries (such as auto industry) production costs cannot be ignored. Therefore, future research can discuss the manufacturer's quality investment strategy in consideration of production costs and the retailer's information strategy.

Key words: information acquisition, quality preference, channel encroachment, signal game, committed acquisition, contingent acquisition

摘要： 制造商渠道入侵是普遍存在的商业现象。现有文献广泛关注制造商的渠道运营策略,而较少研究渠道入侵下的零售商应对措施。考虑到零售商在获取消费者信息方面的优势,本文在双渠道环境下首先研究了制造商的渠道销售策略和产品质量决策,进而提出了零售商应对渠道入侵的最佳信息获取策略。研究发现:1)当市场中消费者质量偏好较高时,双渠道中均有销售市场,反之可能出现“渠道关闭”的情况;2)不同信息获取策略(承诺/依赖)将分别通过“激励效应”和“诱导效应”促使制造商提升产品质量,进而提高渠道销售价格;3)基于此,本文提出一种最佳信息获取策略,该策略能最大程度上激励制造商投入质量研发,在保证零售商自身利润最大化的同时,保证消费者期望效用处于最高水平。本文为零售商应对制造商渠道入侵提供了理论指导,并为提升产品质量、提高消费者期望效用提供了参考意见。

关键词: 信息获取, 质量偏好, 渠道入侵, 信号博弈, 承诺, 依赖