Haiyue Zhang

In the live streaming e‐commerce market, heterogeneous live streamers compete over a cooperation contract to promote a manufacturer's product interactively. Considering the small live streamer's selling ability information and the manufacturer's product quality information are private, we develop a principal–agent model to screen the private information. Since the big live streamer is stronger while the small live streamer is weaker than the manufacturer, the contract decision authority of the manufacturer (i.e., the principal) would shift to the big live streamer when cooperating with the big live streamer (i.e., the agent). After analyzing the impacts of competition and information asymmetry on the manufacturer, we find that information advantage could hurt the high‐quality manufacturer in some conditions, which is contrary to the common sense that information advantage always generates non‐negative information rent for its owners. Moreover, with the increase of quality differentiation, the manufacturer first suffers greater losses and then suffers smaller losses and then benefits more revenues and then benefits less revenues from its information advantage under a low‐commission separating strategy. In addition, we find that the manufacturer can benefit from the competition among heterogeneous live streamers. The higher the quality of the manufacturer, the more capable they are of benefiting. This result underscores the urgency for manufacturers to cultivate their own live streamers to compete with the big ones in practice.

When an online manufacturer suffers from demand reduction and product return caused by product fit uncertainty, it could display products in a retailer’s store to provide the chance for consumers to examine whether the product fits their needs. According to whether the product the retailer sells is noncompetitive or competitive, this study considers that there are cooperation and co-opetition strategies for the online manufacturer to realize an offline showroom partnership. In addition, the retailer would provide retail service for consumers who visit the store, while the service cost information is private. Thus, this study explores the optimal offline showroom partnership for an online manufacturer under information asymmetry. The results show that although partnering with a competitive retailer causes product competition, the online manufacturer would prefer the co-opetition strategy if (i) the competition intensity between the two products is low or (ii) the competition intensity is high and the cost to handle the returned product is low, and would prefer the cooperation strategy otherwise. Under the optimal strategy, the online manufacturer should design the contract according to the return handling cost. Nevertheless, the online manufacturer could set a higher price under the co-opetition strategy than that under the cooperation strategy. After comparing the online manufacturer’s optimal strategies and profits in different information environments, we find that product competition could reduce the online manufacturer’s profit loss caused by information asymmetry under certain conditions, and the online manufacturer with low return handling cost is more willing to adopt the co-opetition strategy under information asymmetry.

This paper aims to investigate how to coordinate a dual-channel supply chain composing of a manufacturer and a retailer when customers utilize the retailer’s service to conduct free-riding behavior. Specially, we consider the crucial role of service in affecting customers’ valuation for a kind of experience product and establish a channel choice model by employing utility theory. Then, we analyze the optimal pricing and service decisions under decentralized and centralized scenarios. To achieve overall optimization, we propose three contract mechanisms, namely price hike (Mechanism 1), price hike with service cost sharing (Mechanism 2) and price hike with service cost sharing and surplus compensation (Mechanism 3). We reveal the way of price difference and service provision in affecting customer free-riding behavior. Besides, we find that the three mechanisms can reduce free-riding behavior to some extent. However, the extent varies under different mechanisms and is related to the cost-sharing fraction and the degree by which the manufacturer increases his online price. Further, we find that Mechanism 3 can realize overall optimization and members’ win–win situations. Finally, we conduct numerical examples to explore how different mechanisms affect supply chain efficiency. The results also provide managerial insights for dual-channel firms in practice.

In many short video platforms around the world using MCN mode as the main expansion of the video distribution, ranging from the Tik Tok, Youtube to other, “Yitiao" is completely with the PGC mode. The production content, the positioning of the audience as the middle class, the launching of original short videos, and the unique aesthetic content and accurate audience positioning, have revolutionalized the short video industry. With the use of innovative business model, “Yitiao” brings the content and interconnected new media features into the commercial e-commerce field, and combines innovation with offline cultural output. The problems arising from this, such as the lack of strong technical support, and the commercialized and countered core content are not negligible, and they may affect the vitality of monetizing content e-commerce.