学术报告：Sourcing Competition Under Cost Uncertainty and Information Asymmetry

分享人：吴肖乐 复旦大学管理学院管理科学系教授、博士生导师

主持人：谢磊   山东大学管理学院管理科学与工程系 副研究员

时间：2020年07月01日（星期三）10:00-11:30

腾讯会议：会议号 431 706 001

会议链接 https://meeting.tencent.com/s/ZbpJO7cMAGm2

学术报告摘要：Driven by increasing costs in the traditionally-regarded low-cost manufacturing bases (e.g., China), many firms have started to outsource their production to the regions of even lower costs (e.g., Southeast Asia). However, a new environment may involve higher cost uncertainty and severer information asymmetry. Motivated by these observations, we consider a sourcing game where competing firms choose between a supplier with transparent certain cost (type-C supplier) and a supplier with potentially lower but less transparent, uncertain cost (type-U supplier). We characterize the equilibrium of the sourcing game and study how different parameters affect the firms' sourcing strategy and profit performance. First, we find that due to information asymmetry, a large market size can make firms prefer the C-supplier to the U-supplier even if the latter has a lower average cost. Second, reducing the cost uncertainty or improving the signal accuracy of the U-supplier does not necessarily make it more attractive to sourcing firms, which cautions the suppliers when making efforts to mitigate cost uncertainty or improve cost estimation. Third, higher competition intensity makes the diversified sourcing strategy more likely to be adopted under certain conditions. Interestingly, increasing the cost of the C-supplier (e.g., a cost hike in China) may make both sourcing firms better off because it can lead to a new sourcing equilibrium. Finally, this paper shows that the direction of quantity distortion under the optimal competitive mechanism differs from that under the traditional monopolistic setting.

分享人简介：吴肖乐，复旦大学管理学院教授、博士生导师。2006于清华大学工业工程系取得学士学位，2011年博士毕业于圣路易斯华盛顿大学。主要研究供应链管理、风险管理、可持续性运营问题。其研究工作发表于Management Science, MSOM, POM等。主持包括国家自然科学基金优秀青年项目、面上项目等。入选上海市曙光人才计划、上海市教育系统巾帼建功标兵。曾获中国管理学青年奖、华人学者管理科学与工程协会最佳论文一等奖、上海市第十三届哲学社会科学优秀成果二等奖、2016 MSOM Meritorious Service Award等。目前担任期刊POM的Senior Editor, Service Science 和Modern Supply Chain Research and Applications 的Associate Editor。