报告题目: The enemies from within: When your supplier produces a copycat of your branded product
报告人：Hubert Pun
时间：6月20号下午2.00-4.00

地点：经管704
报告内容摘要:  By outsourcing the production of a product, a manufacturer distributes its intellectual property (IP) into a supply chain that it may not be able to fully control.  This can lead to copycat products from the manufacturer’s supplier or from a third-party firm. The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of copycat products on a supply-chain. The problem of a supplier producing a copycat has recently been reported in numerous news outlets. However, the papers that study the impact of copycats do not consider the possibility that a supplier is selling copycat products. We use a game-theoretic approach that examines a system where a manufacturer outsources to a supplier. The supplier and a third-party firm decide whether or not to enter the market with a copycat product while the manufacturer selects the level of marketing investment. The manufacturer can deter a copycat by (1) reducing its investment, making the introduction of a copycat product unattractive, and/or (2) signing an IP agreement with its supplier to eliminate the threat of copycatting from its supplier. We find that the manufacturer is not always better off signing an IP agreement with its supplier, even when the cost of administering an IP agreement is negligible. We also find that a low cost to enter the market with a copycat product is not always beneficial for a supplier. Signing an IP agreement with a supplier or reducing investment to deterring profitable entry are “second-best” solutions. When compared to the “first-best” scenario where copycatting in the industry is infeasible, we show that even the supplier and the consumers can be worse off because the possibility of being copycatted disincentivizes the manufacturer to invest in the market. Therefore, our results provide justification for governments to strengthen regulation against copycat product.

报告人简介: Hubert Pun is an assistant professor and the PhD program coordinator of the Management Science area group at the Ivey Business School (Western University). He graduated from the Kelley School of Business (Indiana University) in 2010, where he completed his PhD in Operations Management and Decision Sciences. He joined the Ivey Business School in 2010 and has taught in the undergraduate, MBA and Ph.D. programs. In the last couple of years, he has been awarded Ivey Dean’s Teaching Commendation Letters (top 10% Ivey faculty) and the University Students’ Council Teaching Honor Roll. His research interests include marketing/operations interface, co-opetitive supply chain management, and healthcare operations management. He has published in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM), Production and Operations Management (POM), Journal of Operations Management (JOM), European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR), Naval Research Logistics (NRL), Decision Sciences (DS), etc. Currently, he is serving as an associate editor at the International Journal of Production Research (IJPR).

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