Recently, the showroom model has developed fast for allowing consumers to evaluate a product offline and then buy it online. This paper aims at exploring the optimal information acquisition strategy and its incentive contracts in an e-commerce supply chain with two competing e-tailers and an offline showroom. Based on signaling game theory, we build a mathematical model by considering the impact of experience service and competition intensity on consumers’ demand. We find that, on the one hand, information acquisition promotes supply chain members to obtain demand information directly or indirectly, which leads to forecast revenue. On the other hand, information acquisition promotes supply chain members to distort optimal decisions, which results in signal cost. The optimal information acquisition strategy depends on the joint impact of forecast revenue, signal cost and demand forecast cost. Notably, in some conditions, the offline showroom will not acquire demand information even when its cost is equal to zero. We also design two different information acquisition incentive contracts to obtain Pareto improvement for all supply chain members.

中文翻译：

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线下展厅模式下电子商务供应链中的信息获取及其激励

近来，陈列室模式发展迅速，让消费者可以在线下评估产品，然后在线购买。本文旨在探索具有两个相互竞争的电子零售商和一个线下陈列室的电子商务供应链中的最佳信息获取策略及其激励契约。基于信号博弈论，考虑体验服务和竞争强度对消费者需求的影响，建立数学模型。我们发现，一方面，信息获取促进供应链成员直接或间接获取需求信息，从而导致预测收入。另一方面，信息获取促使供应链成员扭曲最优决策，从而导致信号成本。最优的信息获取策略取决于预测收入、信号成本和需求预测成本的共同影响。值得注意的是，在某些情况下，即使成本为零，线下展厅也不会获取需求信息。我们还设计了两种不同的信息获取激励合约，以获得所有供应链成员的帕累托改进。