报告题目：Information Sharing in the Online Marketplace when Sellers Incur Nonlinear Costs

报告摘要：We study demand information dissemination of an online platform through which multiple sellers distribute their partially substitutable products. The platform has superior information about consumer demand and determines whether, and with how many sellers, to share the information. An important feature of our study is that the sellers have a nonlinear cost structure. We investigate the effect of and incentives for information sharing using a unified model that incorporates three types of nonlinear cost structure: constant marginal cost, increasing marginal cost, and decreasing marginal cost. We show that the cost structure alone determines the direction of the impact of information sharing on revenue and cost, while the scope of information dissemination (the number of sellers who receive information) affects only the magnitude of that impact. The online platform has incentives to voluntarily share demand information with sellers if and only if the cost structure exhibits diseconomy, linearity, or moderate economy of scale. When the economy of scale is too large, sharing information with sellers will reduce the total revenue and thus the platform's earned commission. The online platform shares information with fewer sellers if their products are more similar.

报告人简介：Tian Li is a professor at East China University of Science and Technology, the School of Business. Her research interests include operations-marketing interface, supply chain competition, and information sharing and contract design in supply chains.