Strategic Communication for Capacity Alignment with Pricing in a Supply Chain
研究零售商与制造商之间通过廉价谈话共享需求预测信息，分析在产能和定价决策前如何实现真实信息共享，发现需求不确定性可促进可信沟通并惠及双方。
We study a supply chain comprised of a retailer who sources a product from a manufacturer. The retailer has superior forecast information about market demand, and the manufacturer builds the capacity and sets the wholesale price prior to demand realization. We explore forecast information sharing between the retailer and the manufacturer by means of cheap talk. We show that meaningful forecast information can be shared truthfully only before the manufacturer sets both the capacity and the wholesale price. By sharing the demand forecast with the manufacturer, the retailer faces the trade-offs between inflating the forecast to convince the manufacturer to increase capacity and deflating the forecast to persuade the manufacturer to offer a lower wholesale price. When the value of forecast information sharing is high, the trade-offs are balanced, and incentives are aligned, leading to truthful information sharing. Moreover, we find that larger demand uncertainty can promote credible information sharing and, surprisingly, can benefit both firms. Finally, we demonstrate that under general distributions, in equilibrium, firms share forecasts as a form of range/interval, which has been also implemented in practice. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.