Information Sharing in a Supply Chain with Learning Effect

摘要

We study the impact of information sharing across decentralized retailers in a supply chain. The manufacturer supplies similar products to multiple retailers and each retailer serves its independent end market. Retailers face one period of demand and can satisfy the demand by ordering in the first period or back-ordering some of the demand and satisfying it in the second period. The wholesale price in the second period is decreasing in the total order size, across the retailers, in the first period. We show that retailers have no incentives to share information about their private values when equilibrium order quantities are interior, i.e., the order size is between zero and the demand. This result is contrary to the result in oligopoly models on information sharing. In addition, we show that the impact of information sharing is decreasing when there are more retailers.