This paper considers a two-echelon supply chain consisting of an upstream manufacturer (M) and a downstream Retailer (R) who transact intermediate products via a wholesale price contract. The supply chain provides an experience good to unit-demand consumers. M is liable for the harm caused by its products in a low quality state. A two-stage game model is built to describe how the supply chain operates. With the equilibrium and under certain assumptions, this paper finds that (1) in spite that post-sale product liability positively affects the wholesale price, M’s quality level, the contracted quantity and supply chain members’ profitability are independent of it; (2) when liability-related factors and M’s quality improvement efficiency change, the wholesale price serves as a medium for M and R to mutually share the ex ante expected liability cost, the demand loss caused by the ex ante expected consumer harm and the ex ante quality-improving cost; (3) in response to changes in liability-related factors, the quality performance is in conflict with the financial performance for both M and R, but this conflict disappears in the presence of a change in quality improvement efficiency. Managerial insights are also discussed.

This paper proposes a matching-and-pricing mechanism for a drivers’ demand-reporting problem in parking-sharing programs in which owners share their private parking slots with drivers. We generate a driver-slot matching solution by a centralized assignment procedure according to the demand and supply information reported by drivers and owners, respectively, and determine truth-telling pricing by the Vickrey-Clark-Grove mechanism. We show that under the assumption that drivers do not know with certainty whether other drivers will show up to compete for the parking slots, the mechanism proposed in this paper induces drivers to truthfully report their private information of the travel plans and guarantees three other desirable properties: participation of drivers and slot owners, optimal system efficiency, and balance of the system’s budget. We further extend these results to two dynamic situations. Finally, the results of the numerical experiments based on real-world data demonstrate the performance of the mechanism. History: This paper has been accepted for the Service Science Special Issue on Innovation in Transportation-Enabled Urban Services. Funding: This work was partially funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71972026, 72192805, and 71971044], the Major Program of National Social Science Foundation of China [Grant 20&ZD084], and the Leading Talent Program of Guangdong Province [Grant 2016LJ06D703]. Supplemental Material: The online supplement is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/serv.2022.0303 .

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.

The observation that firms are greenwashing in their advertisements to consumers has attracted regulatory false claim concerns; thus, we built a three-stage game theoretical model to explore how a firm’s efficiency in greenness information acquisition and a false claims ban (FCB) regulatory policy induce greenwashing (non-greenwashing) in the green advertising market. We solved the model with the concept of the perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Based on the PBEs, we obtained the following results. (1) A FCB regulatory policy is necessary to rule out any intentional greenwashing PBE. (2) In the presence of a strict FCB regulatory policy (with a large enough FCB penalty), if the precision of the firm’s observed signals is lower (or higher) than a threshold, uninformative non-greenwashing (both unintentional and uninformative non-greenwashing) PBEs arise, and the threshold increases in the FCB penalty. (3) A strict FCB regulatory policy and a high level of efficiency (regarding the firm’s greenness information acquisition) can (together) rule out greenwashing; the threshold of the efficiency of the firm’s greenness information acquisition is independent of the regulatory policy. Managerial implications are also discussed.

Relation-specific investments are usually associated with great risk. Investors, afraid of being held up, are likely to invest too little, endangering both financial and organizational sustainability. Theory suggests that relation-specific investment decisions are mainly affected by potential ex-post bargaining, while experimental evidence shows social-preference-driven thinking affects both investors’ and investees’ behavior. We decompose an experimental hold-up game to identify the effect of reciprocity and the effect of veto power on investees’ transfers. In addition, we investigate the effects of corresponding information disclosures on investors’ performance as possible behavioral remedies to the hold-up problem. We find strong evidence of the effect of reciprocity and reciprocity-related information significantly lower investors’ suboptimal investment. Investors underestimate the effect of reciprocity without related information disclosure. In contrast, we find little evidence of the effect of ex-post veto power on investment decisions. Our results imply that reciprocity-related information disclosure is helpful in promoting both financial and organizational sustainability.