Information sharing and sales patterns choice in a supply chain with product’s greening improvement

This paper investigates the optimal strategies of information sharing and sales patterns in a supply chain with one supplier and one e-tailer who operates an e-platform. The supplier sells green products on the e-tailer’s e-platform either only through reseller pattern or through both reseller and agency sales patterns, and the e-tailer possesses private demand information and chooses whether to share it with the supplier. Our results illustrate that, for given information sharing strategies, the supplier adopts both reseller and agency sales patterns when the production costs are relatively low, but as the production costs increase further and become relatively large, the supplier adopts only reseller pattern. We also find that whatever sales pattern the supplier adopts, whether information sharing benefits the e-tailer depends on some supply chain parameters’ values. Moreover, regardless of the supplier’s sales patterns and e-tailer’s information sharing strategies, the higher the consumers sensitivity towards product’s green level is, the higher channel members’ expected profits and product’s prices and green level are.