Impact of piracy and strategic consumers on the information product supply chain

• 1、Evergrande School of Management, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430081

Abstract：Piracy has always been a common problem in the information product market. In order to explore optimal decision-making problem of information product supply chain composed of supplier, retailer and pirate, based on the influence of consumers\' strategic behavior on the supply chain, a two-stage game model is constructed to study optimal decision-making strategy of each member of the supply chain in the presence of competition from pirate. The results show that, regardless of whether pirate enters the market or not, the total profit of each member of the supply chain in the case of myopic consumers wll increase with the increase of consumers\' patience. Through numerical analysis, it can be concluded that: 1) pirate may not want the quality of pirated products to be too high; 2) when pirate does not enter the market, or pirate enters the market (the quality of pirated products is very low), and consumer patience is lower than a certain threshold, the loss caused by strategic consumers can be reduced by improving consumer patience.

Keywords： piracy strategic consumers supply chain two-stage game information product