Improving a supplier's social responsibility: the effect of competition and incomplete visibility
研究两条竞争供应链中，企业投资提升供应商社会责任的效果，发现价格竞争越激烈，企业投资越多且供应商社会责任改善越大，而完全可见性仅在供应商单位投资成本低时才有益。
Firms face increasing pressure from consumers, governments, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to implement better social responsibility (SR) practices in their supply chains. However, a lack of visibility into suppliers' operations and competition can hinder a firm's efforts to improve SR in its supply chain. In this study, we consider two competing supply chains, each consisting of a single firm and a single supplier, and explore the case where the firms can invest in their suppliers' SR capabilities. We assume the firms do not have full visibility into the suppliers' SR practices. Moreover, the suppliers are under scrutiny from a third party that may disclose the suppliers' compliance levels to consumers. Our results show that increasing the intensity of price competition leads firms to invest more in their suppliers and improves suppliers' SR. We further show that a firm benefits from having full visibility into its supplier's SR practices only when the suppliers' unit investment costs are low. We extend our results to consider the case where consumers respond to the supplier's actual compliance level (rather than just the news of their noncompliance) and demonstrate the robustness of our findings.