Operational issues in digital supply chains

Guide(s)

Jain, Tarun

Department

Production and Operations Management

Area

Production and Operations Management

University

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Place

Bangalore

Publication Date

3-31-2025

Year Awarded

March 2025

Year Completed

March 2025

Year Registered

June 2019

Abstract

Due to rapid digital transformation, various business models are switching to digital platforms and modifying their interaction with supply chain members. These platforms connect advertisement market and customers in a pure digital content provider business. On the other hand, e-commerce businesses connect sellers and customers. However, sev eral issues in the design of these platform businesses need to be addressed to obtain higher economic benefits and generate a high social surplus. In the first essay, we consider the setup where online content provider (or publisher) displays ads on its generate revenue for websites but may cause discomfort among customers due to issues such as privacy concerns, slow page loading speed, or distraction while consuming the website content. In this essay, we analyze customers’ decisions to opt between two models that allow them to block ads over the publisher’s website: (i) Customer incentivization model, where customers use an ad-blocking browser that blocks ads on the website, but also rewards customers if they choose to see some ads (e.g., Brave Browser), and (ii) Whitelisting content provider model, where customers use a browser with an installed ad-blocker that blocks ads over the website but also earns some revenue for allowing limited ads (or whitelisted ads) over the website (e.g., Google Chrome with Adblock Plus extension). In our model setup, we characterize the equilibrium ad-intensity and revenue sharing decisions. Our analysis reveals that the market may converge to a scenario where only customer incentivization-based browser exists if customers face low ad-disutility. How ever, high ad-disutility may ensure the existence of both browsers in the market. In the second essay, we consider a setup where an original seller or counterfeit seller offers its product over a digital platform. We study anti-counterfeit investments by platform, customers, and social planner in e-commerce supply chain. We study two mechanisms from the perspective of social planner to combat counterfeiting over digital platform: (i) Seller liability mechanism, where the counterfeit seller incurs liability to pay compensation to customers, and the platform also retains some fraction of compensation, and (ii) Fallback liability mechanism, where counterfeit seller and platform share the liability cost to compensate customers. Our results suggest that the social planner may take into account factors such as the relative quality of counterfeit product (compared to the authentic product), probability of the seller being counterfeit, effectiveness of detecting fake product, and the compensation paid to customers, while deciding the liability mechanism to combat counterfeits. Finally, in the third essay, we consider a model setup where an online third-party seller inflates its product’s reviews to deceive customers about the actual quality of the product. We also consider the setup where platform offers its own product (private labels). We consider two mechanisms from the perspective of the social planner to combat such review inflation: (i) Incentive mechanism, where social planner pays some incentive to the platform if it detects and reports fake reviews, and (ii) Liability mechanism, where the platform and the third-party seller share the liability cost paid to customers in the event review inflation is detected. We find that the platform as well as the third-party seller, may set higher inflation level under liability mechanism compared to incentive mechanism depending on the cost of inflation and customers’ ability to identify inflation. Furthermore, we find that, while implementing regulatory policies to combat product review inflation, social planners may need to be more vigilant towards online portals that offer third-party sellers’ products compared to portals where platforms offer their own products (private labels) if cost of inflating reviews is moderate in the market and customers’ ability to detect product review inflation is low.

Pagination

vi, 237p.

Copyright

Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Document Type

Dissertation

DAC Chairperson

Jain, Tarun

DAC Members

Hazra, Jishnu; Tripathi, Rajeev R

Type of Degree

Ph.D.

Relation

DIS-IIMB-FPM-P25-02

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS