Study On The Design Of Incenitve Mechanism In Tourism Service Supply Chain

With the coming of the era of service economy, tourism industrytakes an increasingly proportion in the global economy, and tourismservice supply chain (TSSC) is springing up as a new research area.The comprehensive characteristics of the tourism product determinethat TSSC’s operation is inseparable from the linkup and coordi-nation between the travel agency and the service providers. Theirbenefit objectives, however, are inconsistent, since they are heteroge-neous entities in tourism industry. In general, the service providersare unwilling to report their private information, such as the condi-tion of tourism markets or personal service ability, to the travel agen-cy on their own initiative. Moreover, their laziness and slowdownbehaviors in the processes of serving tourists will jointly damage thetravel agency’s profits. Hence, a practical problem the travel agencyfaces is how to effectively motivate the service providers.This dissertation conducts a systematical study on how the trav-el agency may judiciously prevent the problem above by utilizingincentive mechanism, with management, economics, game theory,principal-agent theory and mechanism design theory, etc., method-ologies synthetically applied.To begin with, the background of TSSC is presented and the ne-cessity of strengthening the study of incentive mechanism design init is pointed out. The principal-agent relationship in TSSC is, then,disentangled and also, the travel agency’s core position is demon-strated based upon the review of existing research.Afterwards, a side payment incentive mechanism is putted for-ward to prevent the service providers’ moral hazard. Under this in- centive mechanism, as shown in Chapter III, not only the serviceproviders’ level of service effort can be enhanced, but also the travelagency is better off and the operational efficiency of the overall sys-tem is ameliorated.In addition, in terms of how to motivate the service provider-s to work harder and, at the same time, to report the real tourismmarkets information by which the travel agency can make tourismoffers decision. A type of screening contracts that has the function-s of multi-objective incentives are designed, and then the impacts ofdifferent factors on the game players’ optimal strategies and individ-ual payoff are analyzed.Furthermore, a mixed incentive mechanism is, through endow-ing the service providers’ service ability with the feature of contin-uum, developed to screen the real ability information as well as toenhance the level of service effort. Meanwhile, a cut-off policy is pro-posed to achieve the goal of eliminating the service providers whohave lower ability. Also, the phenomena, which is caused by thispolicy and is analogous to the “lemons market”, is discussed.Finally, the main contents of this dissertation are summarizedand several directions for future research are provided.