Supply chain fairness issues have become crucial and prevalent recently, whereas the operational decisions in the fair chain are more and more challenging when involving information asymmetry. Considering the fact that the upstream supplier of a chain generally has private production cost information, this paper investigates how the supplier strategically makes pricing decisions under the own private information and the downstream fairness concerns. Based on inequity aversion theory, we set up a signaling game between the supplier and the retailer with two kinds of inequity aversion, disadvantageous inequity aversion and advantageous inequity aversion, respectively. Compared with the scenario of symmetric information, under asymmetric information, we find that: the high-cost supplier distorts the wholesale price upward to avoid the low-cost supplier's price mimicry when the retailer has disadvantageous inequity aversion and the cost difference between the two types of suppliers is small; the supply chain's expected profit and expected utility may increase due to the reason that the low-cost supplier distorts his wholesale price downward when the retailer has advantageous inequity aversion, which mitigates the double marginalization. Moreover, we extend the base model to the scenario of endogenous prior probability on supplier cost type and we show that when the retailer has disadvantageous inequity aversion, cost information asymmetry may improve the willingness of the high-cost supplier to become the low-cost supplier. Our results can provide some practical insights on managing cost information asymmetry from the perspectives of the supply chain and the industry.

中文翻译：

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信号还是不发出信号？公平性问题和成本信息不对称下的定价策略


供应链公平性问题最近变得至关重要和普遍，而当涉及信息不对称时，公平链中的运营决策越来越具有挑战性。考虑到供应链的上游供应商通常拥有私人生产成本信息这一事实，本文研究了供应商如何在自己的私人信息和下游公平性问题下战略性地做出定价决策。基于不公平厌恶理论，我们在供应商和零售商之间建立了一个信号博弈，分别具有两种不公平厌恶，即劣势不公平厌恶和有利不公平厌恶。与对称信息场景相比，在非对称信息下，我们发现：当零售商存在不利的不平等厌恶且两类供应商之间的成本差异较小时，高成本供应商将批发价格向上扭曲，以避免低成本供应商的价格模仿;供应链的预期利润和预期效用可能会增加，因为当零售商有有利的不平等厌恶时，低成本供应商会向下扭曲其批发价格，从而减轻双重边缘化。此外，我们将基本模型扩展到供应商成本类型的内生先验概率情景，并表明当零售商具有不利的不平等厌恶时，成本信息不对称可能会提高高成本供应商成为低成本供应商的意愿。我们的结果可以从供应链和行业的角度为管理成本信息不对称提供一些实用的见解。