As industrial production outsourcing expands, the collaboration relationship of firms evolves to be more entangled, which means that the enterprise communities in the supply chain network become increasingly overlapping and their boundaries are ambiguous. Given the network complexity, deeper insight into the sequencing orders of suppliers and assemblers is required to orchestrate the supply chain partner collaboration. Considering the overlapping community and multi-layered connectivity characteristics of the supply chain network, in this paper, we design a gravitation-based hierarchical community detection algorithm for structuring the supply chain network. The solution applies a functional modules identification strategy based on node gravitation and a hierarchical clustering strategy based on module gravitation to structure the supply chain network architecture. The key technique is to investigate the global gravitational influence of focal firms, segment the functional modules by characterizing the overlapping conditions among communities, and construct the dendrogram by measuring the gravitational forces between modules in order to map the hierarchical architecture of the dendrogram to structure the supply chain network. The proposed algorithm does not necessitate a prior knowledge about the network. It is adaptable to construct the supply chain network that exhibits scale-free, highly overlapped modular community, and hierarchical characteristics. Experimental results on synthetic benchmark and real-world networks demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed algorithm.

Promoting new energy vehicle (NEV) is one of the main ways to save energy and reduce transport emissions, China has provided substantial subsidies for this since 2009. With the impending end of the subsidy policy ending in 2022, NEV manufacturers need to strengthen their competitiveness to continuously attract customers. Under the framework of cue utilization theory, this study takes NEV manufacturers’ technical capability as an intrinsic cue and reputation as an extrinsic cue to explore the mechanism in which two cues stimulate customers’ perceptions of travel quality and brand value, and subsequently motivate purchase intention. Based on a sample of 207 respondents from China, proposed hypotheses have been tested using Likert scale questionnaires through SPSS and AMOS. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to analyze the measurement scales and variable relationships. The results show that manufacturers’ reputation is more influential on both perceived travel quality and perceived brand value than technical capability; Technological turbulence plays a moderating role in the influence between perceived brand value and purchase intention. This article provides references for deepening related theories, and pragmatic insights for manufacturer strategic response and government policy making.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the opaque inventory information disclosure strategy for an online retailer who sells two substitutable products to customers in two selling periods.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a two-period model where an online retailer sells two substitute products with two inventory composition structures to maximize profits. The authors investigate the optimal inventory disclosure decision from both ex post and ex ante perspectives. Sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate the effects that discount rate, transaction cost and the probability of agreeable inventory situation have on the equilibrium disclosure outcome. The authors also consider risk-averse customers and horizontally differentiated products to highlight the robustness of our results.FindingsThe authors find that the online retailer will choose the opaque information disclosure when attempting to increase revenue and reduce the mismatch of supply and demand in both ex post and ex ante inventory information conditions. Comparing with ex post disclosure strategies, ex ante opaque disclosure is optimal in a larger price region, and the total revenues gap between opaque disclosure and complete disclosure gradually increase as discount rate, transaction cost or the probability of agreeable inventory situation decreases. Furthermore, strategic customers may tend to be risk neutral when faced with opaque inventory information in a two-period sales setting.Originality/valueThis current paper is the first paper to study the online retailer's inventory information disclosure strategy in two selling periods. Moreover, this paper presents the conditions under which the online retailer should share complete or opaque inventory information with customers to maximize the online retailer's total revenues.