The Benefits of Downstream Information Acquisition
研究零售商将海量零售数据转化为管理洞察（下游信息获取）在战略渠道中的两种效应：效率效应改善定价决策，战略效应通过自愿披露信息影响制造商批发定价。发现不可观察的信息获取可缓解零售商的损失，且预期成本较低时可能反而有益。
This study investigates the effects of turning terabytes of raw retail data into managerial insights (i.e., downstream information acquisition) in a strategic channel setting. Two effects of information acquisition are identified—the efficiency effect that improves retail pricing decision making in an uncertain environment, and the strategic effect whereby the retailer voluntarily discloses the acquired private information to influence the upstream manufacturer's wholesale pricing behavior. It is shown that the efficiency effect benefits the retailer without affecting the manufacturer, while the strategic effect works to the detriment of the retailer but to the advantage of the manufacturer. Nevertheless, unobservable information acquisition can mitigate the retailer's loss and the manufacturer's benefit from the strategic effect of information disclosure. Moreover, an increasing expected information acquisition cost may benefit the retailer, when that cost is low and information acquisition is unobservable to the manufacturer. The implications of this paper can shed light on how firms interact in a channel where the downstream market is data intensive, but information gleaning is costly.