Modeling the impact of partial information sharing in a three-echelon supply chain

This paper investigates the impact of partial information sharing in a three-echelon supply chain. Partial information sharing means that information sharing occurs only between the distributor and the retailer, but not between the distributor and the manufacturer. This paper contributes to the literature by summarizing the circumstances in which information sharing between the retailer and the distributor benefits the manufacturer. In addition, our study points out that such information sharing does not always bring benefits to the manufacturer and that in some cases the information sharing may harm the manufacturer. We explain the reasons why this can happen and give managerial intuition for our results. Using numerical analysis, we illustrate the impact of partial information sharing on the agents in the supply chain with the change of the autoregressive coefficient in the demand process.