Supply Chain Insights for Hospitality and E-Commerce

Xun Xu

My dissertation explores supply chain management and coordination insights in two of today’s most rapidly growing industries that already comprise a large portion of GDP in many countries: hospitality and e-commerce. I explore how to utilize pricing and cooperative advertising strategies to both increase the profit of tourism supply chains and to take advantage of appropriate e-service offerings to enhance supply chain profits in e-commerce. However, maintaining a long-term sustainable profit also requires businesses to develop socially and environmentally responsible businesses practices. Therefore, sustainability issues in supply chains are also explored. My dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay explores tourism supply chain coordination through pricing and cooperative advertising strategies. I analyze a tourism supply chain containing a theme park, local hotels, and multiple travel agents using a game theoretic approach. I find that a vertical cooperative advertising strategy is particularly effective in increasing customer demand and profit of the whole tourism supply chain. The profits can be even further increased by incorporating pricing of both the hotel rooms and the theme park into a coordinated decision. The second essay identifies the impact of each of the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainable hospitality supply chain management actions on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and willingness to pay a premium for sustainable hospitality goods and services. Utilizing data collected from U.S. consumers who frequently stay at hotels, I find that the influence is significantly positive, except that the social dimension actions are found to have a negative influence on customer willingness to pay a premium. The third essay investigates the role of various e-service offerings in generating customer demand via customer cumulative ratings. Using a leading online shopping website in China, I collected data from 8000 sellers’ respective customer cumulative ratings, history, price, and e-service offerings. I discovered that although customer cumulative ratings always have a positive influence on generating customer demand, the influence of specific e-service offerings on customer cumulative ratings depends on products’ perceived risk and their utilitarian / hedonic categorization.

Supply Chain Insights for Hospitality and E-Commerce

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