020-0638 Horizontal Information Sharing in the Cluster Supply Chain

Cluster supply chain is a supply chain network system based on the industry clusters, which had developed rapidly in theoretical and practical in China recently. Characteristics of the cluster, such as, geographical proximity and the existence of social network, enable the participants of it to communicate quickly and obtain large amount of information. However, the fierce competition between these homogeneous companies within the cluster often leads to the pollution of the information transmission environment by outdated, overlapped, or false information. This paper studied the horizontal technical information sharing problem in the cluster supply chain based on the Cournot competition model. Unlike prior studies’ conclusion that there is no incentive for companies with horizontal competition to voluntarily share their private information, our analysis showed that, information sharing can be achieved in the context of cluster supply chain when there exists cooperative innovation between companies within the cluster.