Cooperative models for technology supply chain in online social community

Abstract

In this paper, a technology supply chain (TSC) coordination issue arising from the online social community (OSC), which is composed of one manufacturer and one technology service supplier (TSS), is investigated. OSC is an emerging concept and gradually employed by many bellwether manufacturers. Five different cooperation models, including decentralized TSC without processing consumer information (CI), decentralized TSC without CI sharing, centralized TSC without CI sharing, decentralized TSC with CI sharing and centralized TSC with CI sharing, are analyzed on how to affect the behaviors of TSC members. We find that each member of TSC can benefit from processing CI in OSC. Adopting centralized TSC with CI sharing is the most profitable for the whole supply chain and manufacturer of TSC with CI sharing has to pay more effort into processing CI. Then, the price interval of manufacturer charging for CI sharing is discussed. Finally, some managerial insights are obtained from numerical analysis. The key contribution of the paper lies in analyzing different TSC cooperation models and their equilibrium values and discussing the acceptable price of TSS for CI sharing under the influence of free-riding strategy. We also think that new information technologies preferred by manufacturer will reduce the information sharing fee in decentralized TSC. Our analysis is used to provide insights for decision-makers.