Abstract:

In recent years， with the rapid development of the platform economy in the world， the platform supply chain has begun to receive sufficient research attention. In the uncertain market environment， the information asymmetry of the supplier's product/service/content quality in the platform supply chain often leads to moral hazard problems， and the incentive contract can reduce this risk. Motivated by this problem， suppliers’ continuation value is introduced as a state variable to measure the overall performance of the supplier， the platform’s profit distribution mechanism is designed to incentive two competing suppliers’ effort， and the optimal dynamic incentive contract model is constructed based on the continuous-time principal-agent theory and stochastic process. By transforming the dynamic incentive contract problem into a stochastic optimal control problem， the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation （HJB） satisfying the platform utility value function is obtained， and further the existence and uniqueness of its concave solution are proved. Finally， numerical solutions are provided to explain the effects of the competition on the platform supply chain decision-making under different market volatility. The results suggest that： （1） In a highly uncertain market environment， the platform can give suppliers appropriate subsidies to incentivize suppliers to improve their efforts. （2） When the cost coefficient of effort is very large， the platform shares a part of the cost of suppliers to incentivize suppliers to improve product quality and achieve a win-win situation. （3）The platform can reduce the risk premium it pays to the suppliers through competition between suppliers， thereby increasing the platform’s profit.

Key words: platform supply chain, moral hazard, competing suppliers, dynamic incentive contract, stochastic optimal control