Huajiang Luo, Assistant Professor of School of Economics and Management, Southwest Jiaotong University, published a paper entitled Supplier Encroachment, Information Sharing, and Channel Structure in Online Retail Platforms on Production and Operations Management, one of UTD 24 journals, in March 2022.

In this paper, they develop a game-theoretic model to study the encroachment and information sharing decisions in a supply chain with a manufacturer selling through an online retail platform. In the base model, the manufacturer decides whether to encroach or not by selling through an agency channel, in addition to an existing reselling channel, at the same platform, who decides whether or not to share information with the manufacturer. They fully characterize the equilibrium decisions and show how they depend on the commission rate of the agency channel, channel substitutability, and information accuracy. Their analysis unfolds a novel wholesale price effect that extends related results in the literature. They also show that encroachment and information sharing are complementary, and therefore managers should not ignore the impact of one decision on the other decision even when the latter is not a primary motivation of the former. They study several model extensions to obtain additional insights and show that the major findings of the base model are robust and remain mostly valid when some modeling assumptions are changed.

Luo Huajiang, Assistant Professor of School of Economics and Management, of Southwest Jiaotong University, obtained the doctoral degree from Lingnan University of Hong Kong. His research interests are operations management and supply chain management.