Time: 14:00-16:00, 23 May 2025
Speaker: Liu Yang is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Business School of the University of International Business and Economics. She received her PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include supply chain management, operations management, and the interface of operations and marketing. She has published more than 30 SSCI/SCI articles in leading international journals such as Decision Sciences, Naval Research Logistics, Transportation Research Part B, and European Journal of Operational Research, and has led three National Natural Science Foundation of China projects.
Abstract:
Customer to Manufacturer (C2M) mode is becoming popular in e-commerce platforms. The platforms purchase private brand products (P-product) from manufacturers and sell them to customers. Meanwhile, the manufacturers sell national brand products (N-product) in the platforms to the customers directly. In this paper, we investigate C2M with one manufacturer and one platform. We find that under exogenous wholesale price of P-product, an increased wholesale price benefits the manufacturer and does not hurt the platform, which promotes cooperation between the two players. When the wholesale price is endogenously determined by the manufacturer, C2M creates a win-win-win situation in which both the manufacturer and platform earn increased profits, and social welfare increases. Specifically, the platform always benefits from establishing a P-product. When the quality of the P-product is sufficiently high, the manufacturer gets a higher profit in C2M than in a single-product market. The results are quite unexpected. First, C2M helps the manufacturer earn revenue by selling the P-product to the platform, reaching a market segment it cannot access without C2M. Second, the manufacturer can increase the N-product price in C2M and earn a higher profit margin. Therein, the manufacturer is willing to collaborate with the platform to establish a high-quality P-product.
