Information Exchange and Strategic Behavior in Supply Chains : Application to the Food Sector

Information technology (IT) facilitates information exchange between retailers and suppliers. Based on evidence from food industry, information strategies under uncertainty are analyzed, using game theory. Some key results are under certain conditions, retailers withhold valuable sales data from suppliers even if this means less supply coordination; a revealed equilibrium exists where suppliers learn retailers' market data despite retailers' withholding of such data; this leads either to full information convergence or, surprisingly, incomplete information convergence with some informational asymmetry left; retailers with greater market power and numerous suppliers are more inclined to share, rather than to withhold, information