Pricing Strategies of a Three-Stage Supply Chain: A New Research in the Big Data Era

In the Big Data era, Data Company as the Big Data information (BDI) supplier should be included in a supply chain. In the new situation, to research the pricing strategies of supply chain, a three-stage supply chain with one manufacturer, one retailer, and one Data Company was chosen. Meanwhile, considering the manufacturer contained the internal and external BDI, four benefit models about BDI investment were proposed and analyzed in both decentralized and centralized supply chain using Stackelberg game. Meanwhile, the optimal retail price and benefits in the four models were compared. Findings are as follows. (1) The industry cost improvement coefficient, the internal BDI investment cost of the manufacturer, and the added cost of the Data Company on using Big Data technology have different relationships with the optimal prices of supply chain members in different models. (2) In the retailer-dominated supply chain model, the optimal benefits of the retailer and the manufacturer are the same, and the optimal benefits of the Data Company are biggest in all the members.