Supply chain coordination under information asymmetry: a review

Abstract

Aligning supply chain decisions of separate entities with independent objectives can be considered to be one of the difficulties of supply chain management. This difficulty becomes worse if the supply chains are characterised by an asymmetrical distribution of information. Although considerable research has recently been devoted to supply chain coordination, less attention has been paid to different information asymmetry settings to the mechanisms underlying it. This research attempts to help fill this gap by reviewing and classifying the literature based on supply chain features, applied methodology, coordination mechanisms, and types of information asymmetry. The proposed classification is used to highlight the ongoing issues in the area and identify the direction for future research.

Keywords:

• Asymmetric information
• supply chain coordination
• supply chain management

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to sincerely thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments and suggestions that helped to improve earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mohammadali Vosooghidizaji http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9871-4180