The Role of Retail Information Link in MNF's Coordination of Profit and Social Welfare via Procurement Outsourcing

“Retail Link” initially developed by Walmart enables the tier-1 supply chain partners to access the sales big data, and hence achieve demand information sharing. Doing so helps improve supplier relationships, but the supplier can make better wholesale price decisions based on accurate demand information, which might hurt the profit of the multinational firm (MNF) such as Walmart. Therefore, it is observed that some MNFs outsource both procurement and logistics functions to a logistics service provider (LSP) for the benefits of “one-stop-shopping,” and meanwhile, cut the information link with the supplier. This significantly changes their decision interactions and the resulted social welfare. In this article, we build a co-opetition model and study an MNF's two typical outsourcing strategies, where the MNF either outsources the logistics or the bundled functions of procurement and logistics to an LSP. We find that, when the market demand uncertainty is low, the MNF prefers bundled outsourcing given its significant brand image advantage. When the market demand uncertainty is high, the MNF prefers bundled outsourcing regardless of its brand image advantage. Interestingly, when market demand uncertainty is moderate, the MNF prefers bundled outsourcing when its brand image advantage is either not significant or very significant. We further compare the social welfare levels under two outsourcing strategies and find that win–win situations in the senses of the MNF's profit and social welfare can be identified.