The role of fairness concern in duopoly mobile app digital service supply chain

Purpose This paper aims to explore the impact of both peer-induced and distributional fairness concern on competitive mobile app service supply chain. Design/methodology/approach Based on game theory, this research constructs a mobile app supply chain consisting of duopoly suppliers and a dominant distributor. We formulate three fairness concern models: (1) the suppliers being peer-induced fairness conscious, (2) the distributor being distributional fairness conscious and (3) the suppliers being peer-induced fairness conscious and the distributor being distributional fairness conscious. Additionally, we extend the model to a duopoly distributors’ environment. Findings Firstly, we demonstrate that the previously established finding, which posits that upstream suppliers’ peer-induced fairness concerns consistently benefits downstream retailers, is not applicable to mobile app supply chains. Secondly, in a duopoly suppliers’ environment, any form of fairness concern among supply chain members negatively impacts their profitability while in a duopoly distributors’ environment, the supply chain entities’ fairness concern may exert positive effect on their profit. Thirdly, the distributor’s profit may decrease with the network externality coefficient if the revenue retaining ratio and the distributor’s cost coefficient are relatively low in a dual fairness concern scenario. Originality/value The authors originally explore the effect of both peer-induced and distributional fairness concern on competitive mobile app service supply chain, which has not been explored in the literature to the best of our knowledge.