Exploring the Value of Information Sharing in Mitigating Supply Chain Disruptions: Impact of Channel Encroachment

ABSTRACT Globalization has significantly amplified the risk of supply chain disruptions, posing serious threats to operational stability. While e‐commerce platforms facilitate information sharing among supply chain members, the precise strategic value of such sharing under disruption risk remains insufficiently explored, particularly across different distribution channels. This research examines a two‐tier supply chain comprising a manufacturer with potential supply disruptions and an e‐commerce platform. The interaction is modeled using a Stackelberg game framework under two distinct sales configurations: without and with manufacturer encroachment. The analysis reveals that the value of information sharing is highly sensitive to several factors, including the sales channel structure, the pattern of demand fluctuations, the manufacturer's efficiency in improving resilience, the intensity of channel competition, and the platform's revenue‐sharing rate. Under the wholesale model, the platform prefers (not) to share negative (positive) demand information. In contrast, under the hybrid model, the platform's sharing strategy becomes complex, which is jointly moderated by multiple parameters. Notably, under disruption‐induced capacity constraints, a higher ex‐ante capacity commitment to the wholesale channel paradoxically reduces realized order volumes, as the manufacturer raises wholesale prices to compensate for reduced allocation flexibility. The manufacturer's encroachment decision is fundamentally a trade‐off between fixed entry costs and anticipated incremental gains. Both elevated revenue‐sharing rates and intensified channel competition are found to suppress the manufacturer's incentive to encroach. Finally, extensions considering endogenous allocation and a signaling game framework demonstrate that the manufacturer's ability to infer demand signals enhances wholesale profitability, thereby further mitigating the motivation for channel encroachment.