Decision-making for demand signal in crowdsourcing platform

For the service-oriented manufacturing supply chain with uncertain demand, based on maximizing each participates' profits, this paper investigates the interaction between pricing mechanism and demand signal acquisition by establishing several signal acquisition models. It is shown that the service-oriented manufacturer always benefits from the additional signal acquired, and the signal releasing does not affect its profitability. While the crowdsourcing intermediary is reluctant to share his private signal with the self-operated crowdsourcing platform, and it is not necessarily beneficial to predict additional signal so as to obtain more accurate demand forecast. As for service preference, it is shown that the impact of consumer's preference on profits is not related to signal acquisition, but is subjected to the service-oriented manufacturer's unit service operating cost. Some numerical experiments are provided to test the validity of the obtained results.