题目：Sourcing Competition under Cost Uncertainty and Information Asymmetry

报告人：复旦大学管理学院 吴肖乐教授

报告时间：2019年5月6日（周一） 下午2:30

地点：管理楼管阶一

报告人简介：

吴肖乐教授，复旦大学管理学院教授，国家自科优青。博士毕业于美国华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校。研究方向为供应链管理，风险管理，采购策略，行为模型，可持续性运营管理。在Management Science、Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 、Production and Operations Management等国际顶级期刊上发表多篇学术论文。

报告摘要：

Driven by increasing costs in the traditionally-regarded low-cost manufacturing bases (e.g., China), many firms have started to outsource their production to the regions of even lower costs (e.g., Southeast Asia). However, a new environment may involve higher cost uncertainty and severer information asymmetry. Motivated by these observations, we consider a sourcing game where competing firms choose between a supplier with transparent certain cost (type-C supplier) and a supplier with potentially lower but less transparent, uncertain cost (type-U supplier). We characterize the equilibrium of the sourcing game and study how different parameters affect the firms' sourcing strategy and profit performance. First, we find that due to information asymmetry, a large market size can make firms prefer the C-supplier to the U-supplier even if the latter has a lower average cost. Second, reducing the cost uncertainty or improving the signal accuracy of the U-supplier does not necessarily make it more attractive to sourcing firms, which cautions the suppliers when making efforts to mitigate cost uncertainty or better cost estimation. Third, higher competition intensity leads the diversified sourcing strategy to be more likely adopted under certain conditions. Interestingly, increasing the cost of the C-supplier (e.g., a cost hike in China) may make both sourcing firms better off because it can lead to a new sourcing equilibrium. Finally, this paper contributes to the mechanism design literature by showing that the direction of quantity distortion under the optimal competitive mechanism differs from that under the traditional monopolistic setting.