管理科学与工程系学术论坛第八十六讲

主 题：Cost Auditing in Profit-sharing Contracts

主讲人: Wanshan Zhu (Associate professor in Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University)

时 间：2019-02-27 10:00

地 点：明德商学楼1008室

语 言：中文

Profit-sharing contracts have been used in supply chains to improve efficiency by eliminating the double marginalization problem, however, asymmetric information causes them to be less efficient. Specifically, when a supplier has private production cost information, he or she has a misreport incentive to inflate costs. As an audit is a tool to combat the misreport incentive, we study the retailer's optimal audit mechanism design problem, which is a challenge to solve due to its nonlinear objective function and non-convex feasible set. Despite this challenge, we obtain the analytical solutions that help clarify the impact of an audit on the order quantity and profit of the supply chain parties. The solutions show that the order quantity decreases with the misreport incentive in the absence of an audit, but an audit can cause it to increase with the misreport incentive. Moreover, in our setting, an audit benefits both the retailer who audits and the supplier who is audited, even though existing studies report a negative impact on the latter. Interestingly, the relative audit value is always higher for the supplier than for the retailer. These findings imply that under a profit-sharing contract, an audit is a valuable tool for all practitioners to use as it mitigates the asymmetric information problem and benefits all the parties involved.