肖勇波，清华大学经济管理学院管理科学与工程系长聘正教授。2000年获清华大学管理信息系统学士学位，2006年获清华大学管理科学与工程硕士和博士学位，2006~2008清华大学经济管理学院应用经济学博士后。担任国际学术期刊Naval Research Logistics的副主编和Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering的执行编辑；担任《中国管理科学》《系统工程理论与实践》《系统管理学报》等国内期刊的编委。研究论文入选2021年度F5000中国精品科技期刊顶尖学术论文，撰写的建言献策报告被多家单位采纳。主要研究领域包括收益与定价管理、运营与供应链管理等，学术论文发表在Operations Research、Production and Operations Management、IIE Transactions、Decision Sciences、Naval Research Logistics等国际学术期刊以及《系统工程理论与实践》《中国管理科学》《管理科学学报》等国内学术刊物上。
With the rapid development of live-streaming commerce, it has been increasingly common for firms (including brands, manufactures, and sellers) to collaborate with live-streamers (e.g., online influencers, celebrities, or key opinion leaders) to sell their products in the live broadcasting room. Despite the great success of live-streamers acting as agents of sellers, it is not uncommon that some live-show's gross merchandise volume (GMV) falls far below its expectation, since the sales volume largely depends on the effort extent that live-streamers devoted in attracting fans and promoting products. In order to reduce the failure risk involved in live sales, the live-streaming agreement signed between the seller and live-streamer sometimes specifies the minimal sales volume, which represents the sales commitment the live-streamer makes to the seller. By doing so, the live-streamer has incentive to devote more effort and the seller has incentive to prepare more inventories. In this paper, we study the impact of such commitment on the performance of supply chains that consist of a single seller and a single live-streamer. In the stylized models under consideration, the live-streamer acts as a selling agent of the seller and determines the effort level devoted in attracting fans and promoting products, and the seller determines the inventory level to be prepared prior to the live-show. We compare the optimal decisions and corresponding expected profits for two scenarios in the absence and presence of sales commitment on the side of the live-streamer, respectively. Note that in the latter scenario, the commitment volume is to be determined by the live-streamer as well. Our research uncovers many interesting managerial insights. Furthermore, benchmarking on the centralized supply chain, we propose a set of commitment-based contracts to coordinate the seller and the live-streamer.
