針對"供應鏈企業如何間接地通過企業社會責任(CSR)策略實現質量信息共享"這一問題,考慮一條由一個供應商、一個零售商和消費者構成供應鏈(其中上游供應商的產品質量信息是其私人信息),建立了供應商基于CSR這一間接信息傳遞方式的上游質量信號傳遞博弈模型,完整地刻畫了不實施CSR模型下的混同均衡和實施CSR模型下的分離均衡,并利用"直觀標準"選出了唯一的分離,以考察CSR在傳遞供應商質量信息中的角色及實施CSR信號手段的盈利性條件。結果表明在一定技術條件下,1)充分高的CSR水平能夠在分離均衡意義上準確傳遞供應商質量信息;2)最低臨界CSR水平所對應的均衡是唯一滿足"直觀標準"的分離均衡;3)最低臨界CSR水平隨著低質量供應商的CSR邊際成本增加而減小,但獨立于高質量供應商CSR邊際成本;4)當且僅當兩類供應商CSR邊際成本差異充分小時,通過CSR手段來共享質量信息對高質量供應商是有利可圖的。該結果一方面揭示了企業CSR行為的信號傳遞動機,另一方面也為企業選擇直接或間接信息共享方式提供了決策參考。

Focusing on the question of how a firm in supply chain indirectly shares the product quality information via its CSR strategy,a supply chain consisting of an upstream supplier,a downstream retailer and final consumers is considered.In this supply chain,the supplier owns private information on the product quality level and tries to signal it by its CSR strategy and the supplier and the retailer transact via a wholesale price contract.Under this quality information asymmetry,in order to examine the role of CSR on signaling the quality level and the profitability conditions for the implementation of CSR mean,a signaling model is built to capture how the supplier indirectly share the quality information by its CSR strategy,the pooling equilibriums in the model when implements no CSR and the separate equilibriums in the model when implements CSR strategy are completely characterized,and a unique equilibrium is selected by the intuitive criterion.The equilibrium results show that under some technical conditions,(1)a high enough CSR level signals a high quality level in the sense of a separate equilibrium,(2)the equilibrium with the lowest threshold of CSR level is the only equilibrium satisfying the intuitive criterion,(3)the lowest threshold of the equilibrium CSR levels increases in the low-quality supplier’s CSR efficiency,but is independent of that of the high-quality supplier,and(4)when and only when the differences between two types of suppliers’ CSR marginal cost are sufficiently small,it is profitable for high quality supplier to share quality information through the CSR mean.These results reveal a quality-signaling motivation of firm’s CSR strategy in a supply chain,provide supply chain managers indirect methods on sharing product quality information except the existing direct way,with an implication on choosing a direct or an indirect way to sharing information conditional on a known cost of direct information sharing.