This study focuses on how an upstream supplier signals the private information of its product quality with corporate social responsibility (CSR) choices to a downstream retailer and uninformed consumers in the final market. We build a signaling model to: capture the strategic interactions among the supplier, the retailer, and the final consumers in the supply chain; characterize completely the set of all separating perfect Bayesian equilibriums (PBEs); and finally, select a unique equilibrium that satisfies the intuitive criterion for exploring some comparative statics. The equilibrium results show that under some technical conditions: (1) a set of moderate levels of CSR conduct signal the upstream supplier’s high quality in the sense of separating PBEs; (2) the unique separating PBE satisfying the intuitive criterion is the one with the lowest CSR level that separates a high-quality supplier from a low-quality supplier; (3) the lowest CSR level decreases in the proportion of informed consumers and the low-quality supplier’s marginal CSR cost, but is independent of the high-quality supplier’s marginal CSR cost; (4) the profits of the high-quality supplier increase in proportion to the number of informed consumers and the low-quality supplier’s marginal cost CSR, but decrease in proportion to the high-quality supplier’s marginal CSR cost. Managerial insights are also discussed.

This paper constructs a two-level supply chain decision model involving one manufacturer, one retailer and consumers. The manufacturer owns private information about product quality, and signals it by corporate social responsibility (CSR) behavior. The retailer undertakes CSR with the manufacturer. In order to investigate the role of CSR on signaling quality, and the influence of the retailer's CSR-sharing behavior, this paper builds an information sharing model. The results show that under certain conditions, the retailer's CSR-sharing behavior does not have the impact on the manufacturer signals its quality information, and the manufacturer's CSR level helps to promote the retailer's investment in CSR. The results provide manufactures' managers with an implication on choosing an indirect way to share quality information, and disclosing quality information as much as possible.

This paper constructs a supply chain decision model involving manufacturers, retailers and consumers. Manufacturers have private information about product quality, which is expressed by corporate social responsibility (CSR) behavior. This paper discusses the feasibility of indirectly transmitting upstream quality signal mechanism through CSR behavior by manufacturers on the basis of retailers' CSR awareness, describes the separation equilibrium, and further analyzes the differences in strategy and performance of supply chain members under different circumstances. The results show that manufacturers can transmit their own quality information through a certain level of CSR behavior. Retailers' strategies under symmetric information and asymmetric information are exactly the same, and they don't have the motivation to raise their awareness of social responsibility. However, H-type manufacturers will implement higher corporate social responsibility behaviors under asymmetric information, so profits will be lost.