Suchergebnisse

Big data ability helps obtain more accurate demand signal. However, is better demand signal always beneficial for the supply chain parties? To answer this question, we investigate a remanufacturing supply chain (RSC), where demand uncertainty is significant, and the value to reduce environmental risk is large. Specifically, we focus on a licensed RSC comprising an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and a third‐party remanufacturer (3PR). The latter pays a unit license fee to the former, and can be risk averse to the demand of remanufactured products. We show that the OEM and the risk‐neutral 3PR always have incentives to improve their big data abilities to increase their profits. However, when the 3PR is risk averse, big data might hurt its profit: the value of big data is positive if its demand signal accuracy is sufficiently low. Interestingly, we find that while information sharing hurts the 3PR, it benefits the OEM as well as the supply chain. Thus, if costly information sharing is allowed, a win–win situation can be achieved. We also find that information sharing generates more valuation when the 3PR is risk averse than that when the 3PR is risk neutral. More importantly, we find that the 3PR's risk attitude and demand signal accuracy can significantly mitigate the negative environmental impact (measured by the amount of the waste): (1) the more risk neutral the 3PR is, the better the environment is; (2) the more accurate demand signal is, the better the environment is.

AbstractNowadays, factories located in COVID‐19 infected countries/regions are facing random outbreaks. If blockchain is adopted, then the outbreaks can be known immediately and emergency production shifting can be enabled, although high crash cost will be incurred. Otherwise, production delay will become inevitable. We therefore formulate the tradeoffs among the high crash cost, the benefit from quick production, and the efficiency loss because of supply chain decentralization in a global brand's blockchain adoption decisions. We show that, in the presence of supply chain competition, the global brand will be benefited from blockchain adoption when the competition intensity degree is high, the crash cost is low, and the probability of COVID‐19 outbreak is high. We then verify the robustness of the main findings by studying the impact of the global brand's risk attitude, its overestimation of production delay, and the unexpected production delay in the low‐risk areas. In addition, we examine the social welfare and find it can also benefit from the global brand's blockchain adoption but the consumer surplus cannot.