Supplier Audit Information Sharing and Responsible Sourcing

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ha, Albert Y.; Shang, Weixin; Wang, Yunjie
• 署名单位: Hong Kong University of Science & Technology; Lingnan University; Renmin University of China
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.4358
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 308-324
• 关键词: sourcing; Social responsibility; supplier audit; information sharing

摘要

We develop a game-theoretic model to study the incentive for competing manufacturers to share supplier audit information. Based on the audit information, each manufacturer decides whether to source from a common supplier who has uncertain responsibility violation risk or to switch to a backup supplier who has no responsibility violation risk but charges a higher price. When supplier responsibility violation occurs, some consumers boycott the manufacturers involved. Audit information allows a manufacturer to reduce the uncertainty about the risk of the common supplier. We show that audit information sharing may make the manufacturers??? sourcing strategies more or less differentiated. As a result, the information-sharing decision is not monotone in the model parameters. We fully characterize the manufacturers??? equilibrium audit information-sharing and sourcing decisions and establish conditions under which audit information sharing induces the manufacturers to adopt more or less responsible sourcing strategies. We also show that a manufacturer could be better off when the cost premium of sourcing from the backup supplier or the risk of the common supplier becomes higher or the audit information becomes less accurate. We consider several extensions of the base model and demonstrate that the main insights remain mostly valid.