Supply chain coordination under asymmetric information and partial vertical integration

AbstractSupply chain contracting is known to suffer from inefficiency in the presence of asymmetric information. Full vertical integration would eliminate the informational inefficiency but can be strategically undesirable. Yet today’s supply chain partnerships exhibit a certain degree of partial vertical integration via equity ties between the firms. Such governance forms received limited attention in supply chain research. Management literature suggests that partial vertical integration may help the firms to ease contracting problems by aligning their incentives, and thus improve the total surplus. We address this proposition by studying a model of a partially integrated supply chain in w…