Platform acquisition in a triple-channel supply chain
Xiaoran Liu,
Lusheng Shao and
Xuwei Qin
European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, vol. 324, issue 3, 1035-1046
Abstract:
Motivated by the observation that some online retail platforms begin to enter offline channels by acquiring traditional retailers, this paper studies the impact of platform acquisition in a context where a manufacturer sells a product via an online agency selling and two offline reselling channels. Considering three changes brought by platform acquisition in practice, namely, showrooming, “pay online but pickup in store (POPS)” and pricing power transfer effects, we investigate how platform acquisition impacts the firms’ pricing behaviors and profits, customer surpluses, and social welfare. Our analysis shows that, although acquisition may hurt the upstream manufacturer and the non-acquired traditional retailer, it always makes the platform and the acquired traditional retailer better off as a whole. Further, it may benefit the total supply chain and improve consumer surpluses and social welfare. Interestingly, platform acquisition leads to a demand siphon force (shifting demand from the non-acquired channel to the two channels related to acquisition) when platform acquisition brings strong showrooming and POPS effects; otherwise, it leads to the opposite demand spillover force. Finally, regarding the decision on the acquisition fee, there exists a moderate range that enables the platform and offline retailer to achieve a win-win situation. These findings collectively provide some valuable insights for decision-makers to understand the impacts of platform acquisition in a competitive triple-channel supply chain.
Keywords: Retail platform; Acquisition; Agency selling; Reselling; Price competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221725001560
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:324:y:2025:i:3:p:1035-1046
DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2025.02.033
Access Statistics for this article
European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati
More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().