Revenue-sharing contracts in supply chains: a comprehensive literature review

Revenue sharing contracts (RSCs) have gained considerable popularity over the past two decades—particularly among prominent platform distributors such as the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Amazon— and have therefore attracted a great deal of research attention in the domain of supply-chain management. This study is the first to review the literature dealing with RSCs, a literature in which the number of articles has been growing consistently over the years. Specifically, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the art of the research field, and to identify potentially fruitful areas for further exploration. To this end, we have carried out a content analysis of 148 carefully selected papers that address various aspects of RSCs in the domains of operations research and operations management. Our survey classifies and discusses the reviewed papers along numerous dimensions of interest, including the types of contract they incorporate and the research questions they address. We provide mathematical formulations of the two RSC structures that are most prevalent in research and in practice: (i) a wholesale-price contract that incorporates an added revenue-sharing mechanism; and (ii) a consignment contract with revenue sharing.