Signaling or not? The pricing strategy under fairness concerns and cost information asymmetry

Supply chain fairness issues have become crucial and prevalent recently, whereas the operational decisions in the fair chain are more and more challenging when involving information asymmetry. Considering the fact that the upstream supplier of a chain generally has private production cost information, this paper investigates how the supplier strategically makes pricing decisions under the own private information and the downstream fairness concerns. Based on inequity aversion theory, we set up a signaling game between the supplier and the retailer with two kinds of inequity aversion, disadvantageous inequity aversion and advantageous inequity aversion, respectively. Compared with the scenario of symmetric information, under asymmetric information, we find that: the high-cost supplier distorts the wholesale price upward to avoid the low-cost supplier's price mimicry when the retailer has disadvantageous inequity aversion and the cost difference between the two types of suppliers is small; the supply chain's expected profit and expected utility may increase due to the reason that the low-cost supplier distorts his wholesale price downward when the retailer has advantageous inequity aversion, which mitigates the double marginalization. Moreover, we extend the base model to the scenario of endogenous prior probability on supplier cost type and we show that when the retailer has disadvantageous inequity aversion, cost information asymmetry may improve the willingness of the high-cost supplier to become the low-cost supplier. Our results can provide some practical insights on managing cost information asymmetry from the perspectives of the supply chain and the industry.