Risk Mitigation Benefit from Backup Suppliers in the Presence of the Horizontal Fairness Concern
研究了主导制造商如何设计合同给备用供应商以缓解主供应商的产量不确定性，发现使用自利备用供应商更优，仅在主供应商可靠性低且备用供应商公平关切不强时才建议使用公平关切的备用供应商。
ABSTRACT The backup supply strategy is demonstrated as an effective approach to mitigating supply risk. We study a supply chain in which a leader manufacturer designs a contract to a potential backup supplier to mitigate the yield uncertainty of the primary supplier. In this context, the backup supplier may compare with the primary supplier and have horizontal fairness concerns. We model the contract design problem using a Stackelberg game and characterize the optimal decisions for the manufacturer and backup supplier, in both fairness and off‐fairness settings. The theoretical results show that the leader manufacturer must sacrifice his own payoff to balance the payoffs of both suppliers. As a result, using a self‐interested backup supplier is the dominating strategy, whereas using a fair‐minded backup supplier is only suggested when the reliability of the primary supplier is low and the fairness concern of the backup supplier is not strong. Additionally, the backup supplier only benefits from fairness concerns when the level is not exceeding a threshold value. With regard to high fairness levels beyond this threshold, fairness concern has negative effects on the monetary payoff and even might lead to loss of the business. By conducting laboratory experiments, we provide evidence of the horizontal fairness concern from the backup supplier. Further, we show that if the primary supplier also has horizontal fairness concerns, the leader manufacturer can conditionally benefit from a promoted yield reliability due to an extra effort from the primary supplier.