Agency selling or reselling: E-tailer information sharing with supplier offline entry
By Shichen Zhang, Jianxiong Zhang. European Journal of Operational Research, 2020
367 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Nowadays, some suppliers are looking for offline expansion in addition to their preexisting online channels relying on e-tailers. This study focuses on the e-tailer’s demand information sharing strategy with the supplier who may build upon brick-and-mortar stores. Both prevailing agreements between the supplier and the e-tailer are investigated: agency selling and reselling. The equilibrium results are quite different under these two agreements. Specifically, when the supplier’s offline entry cost is very small or large, the e-tailer shares information under agency selling while keeps information private under reselling. When the entry cost is intermediate, channel substitution rate is large and information uncertainty is small, the e-tailer withholds the demand information under agency selling while shares information under reselling to deter the supplier from entering an offline channel. Furthermore, two extensions about consumer behavior in multichannel selection are discussed: showrooming and webrooming. With showrooming or webrooming, the e-tailer’s information sharing decisions qualitatively hold, while with showrooming the drive factor behind may change; that is, withholding information under agency selling and sharing information under reselling may also serve as measures to encourage supplier offline entry when the effect of showrooming is strong.
Subfields: Management Information Systems, Management Science and Operations Research, Marketing
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e89a08a0ed683af6b9c6077376eb5a0eadea2bcc
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In Management Information Systems
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Citations in the corpus
- Platform Information Transparency and Effects on Third‐Party Suppliers and Offline Retailers (2021, background): “One exception is a study reported by Zhang and Zhang (2020), which examines a model consisting of a platform and a product supplier.”