Coordination Strategy in an SaaS Supply Chain with Asymmetric Information About the Market

摘要

Cloud computing is a rising type of service system in today's IT world. In this paper we try to design an appropriate contract to coordinate a cloud computing service supply chain with asymmetric information. Our study is based on the SaaS model proposed by Demirkan et al. in 2010, which consists of one application infrastructure provider (AIP) and one application service provider (AIP). However, the assumption of complete information in their model is far from realistic. So we assume that ASP processes private information about its user's delay cost. Through numerical analysis, we find that if restricted only by a simple wholesale-price contract, ASP has an incentive to overstate user's delay cost to obtain a lower rental price from AIP. Therefore, we apply another two contracts-revenue-sharing contract and cost-based pricing policy-to solve the problem and only find that the former is invalid. The latter, on the other hand, works well for AIP to coordinate the supply chain even with incomplete information about terminal market.