Green Promotion Service Allocation and Information Sharing Strategy in a Dual-Channel Circumstance

Abstract

Credit purchase enables the manufacturers in the e-commerce environment to provide pre-sales service that consumers can experience first and pay later. This paper considers demand associated with price and green promotion service level and builds four decentralized game models to study two green promotion service allocation strategies and demand forecasting information sharing strategies in a dual-channel environment. The effects of the degree of dual-channel competition and free-riding on the perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium are studied. The results show that the retailer should actively cooperate with the manufacturer and share private forecasting information if the coefficient of channel substitution is relatively high. Sharing information will aggravate double marginalization and hurt the retailer. In addition, the retailer’s profit is positively influenced by the forecasting accuracy in four models. When the manufacturer invests in the green promotion service, the prediction accuracy hurts the manufacturer’s profit without information sharing and there is a positive impact with information sharing. In particular, when a retailer provides service, we take the consumer’s free-riding behavior into account, and we find that free-riding hurts both parties and the whole supply chain. In addition, the manufacturer’s profit is irrelevant to the prediction accuracy without information sharing and positively influenced by the accuracy with information sharing.