Supply Chain Decision-making Mechanism Considering Platform Digital Empowerment

In recent years,the development of traditional e-commerce has slowed down year by year.Large e-commerce platform enterprises begin to test the water offline frequently and actively expand the retail field,such as JD convenience store under JD new channel platform and Tmall store under Alibaba retail platform.These platforms,with their excellent data resources and powerful data analysis technology,help traditional offline small grocery stores improve their smart data flow network links,namely platform digital empowerment(PDE).By analyzing the consumption data owned by retail stores and the overall data of similar products on the platform,the platform can effectively improve retail stores' data utilization level,so as to help them choose marketable products and increase market demand.Based on the PDE situation of two large e-commerce platforms in reality,this paper focuses on the PDE issues for offline retailers.By illustrating the impact of PDE on market demand,this paper discusses the decision-making mechanism of supply chain members under two typical PDE modes,namely merchant model and platform intermediary model.First of all,according to the operational characteristics of the platform merchant model,we establish a single-cycle two-level supply chain model composed of one e-commerce platform and multiple homogeneous independent retailers.And we solve the decision-making mechanism problem between one platform and multiple retailers.It is found that when the cost coefficient of sales effort is high and the impact of sales effort on demand is weak,retailers should choose to join the platform.Secondly,the more retailers on the platform,the higher the profits of supply chain members,and the higher the retailers' sales efforts and the PDE level will be.Finally,the equilibrium decision under different situations is compared and the optimal cooperation mode of supply chain members is obtained.Then,according to the operational characteristics of the platform intermediary model,we propose a single-cycle supply chain model,which consists of one e-commerce platform,one manufacturer and multiple retailers.By introducing upstream manufacturers,we solved the problem of decision-making mechanism between one platform and upstream manufacturers and multiple retailers.It is found that when the impact coefficient of platform data on demand exceeds a certain threshold,manufacturers should choose to join the platform.Secondly,from the perspective of quantitative analysis,we study the same-side network effect and cross-side network effect of the platform.Finally,we investigate two contracts for supply chain.In particular,in the early PDE process,the platform is not in a hurry to charge retailers.The platform takes advantage of its strong bargaining power and can easily extract high profits from retailers in the future.The innovation points of this paper are as follows:(1)The influence of PDE on decisionmaking of key variables of e-commerce supply chain is discussed;(2)The influence of platform network effect on supply chain decision-making is studied by means of mathematical modeling;(3)Considering the contract coordination mechanism between the platform and supply chain members in the context of PDE.