The Role of Market Evolution in Channel Contracting
研究了真实市场演化（如自相关、连续性和非平稳性）如何影响双边渠道中的合约设计，提出了市场惯性概念，并识别出随机线性性质，为管理者提供了何时使用简单合约的指导。
Real markets evolve over time. They often exhibit complex behaviors, such as autocorrelation, continuity, and nonstationarity. How do these behaviors affect channel contracting? We study the problem in a bilateral channel where the retailer has private information on evolving market conditions. We characterize the optimal contract under arbitrary market evolution. The central notion is market inertia: it prices retailer’s information advantage, dictates price and quantity response over time, and determines the contract complexity. Using market inertia, we identify a general property—stochastic linearity—that justifies the use of simple contracts for a much larger class of channel conditions. For practitioners, we offer refined guidance: (i) when the market has linear dynamics, simple contracts are sufficient; (ii) when the market is continuous, the quantity distortion should be pervasive; and (iii) when the market is nonstationary, the distortion can vanish, intensify, stay constant, or even go nonmonotonic over time. By highlighting the central role of realistic market behaviors, this paper advances our understanding of channel theory and practice.The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3057 . This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.