Time: 10:00-11:30, 22 June 2026
Speaker: Dr. Jing Chen is the William A. Black Chair in Commerce and a professor in the Department of Management Science & Information Systems at the Faculty of Management, Dalhousie University. She received her Ph.D. in Management Science from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include competitive channel and supply chain management, the interface between operations management and marketing, and customer returns. She has published over 100 papers in prestigious journals, including the Production and Operations Management, Journal of Retailing, European Journal of Operational Research, Decision Sciences, The International Journal of Management Science, Naval Research Logistics, IISE Transactions, and Transportation Research Part E. Currently, she serves as an Associate Editor for The International Journal of Management Science (OMEGA), The Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS), IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management (TEM), and International Transactions in Operational Research (ITOR). She has also published more than 30 Ivey business cases.
Abstract:
This study extends that literature by examining retailer partial ownership of the supplier. When the retailer holds a noncontrolling equity stake, it shares in upstream profit without control rights. This structure both dilutes the supplier’s retained gain from direct selling and induces the retailer to order more aggressively by partially internalizing upstream profit. These effects expand total quantity, lower the market-clearing price, compress direct-channel margins, and weaken the coordination value of encroachment. As a result, partial ownership narrows the region of active direct selling, can reverse the wholesale-price effect within that region, and may render encroachment strictly unprofitable for the supplier. The retailer may still benefit from encroachment even with a negative retail margin, because equity participation allows it to capture part of upstream profit. Thus, ownership-linked governance alone can overturn the conventional view of encroachment. These insights remain robust under imperfect channel substitution and alternative decision timing.
