On the Formation of Producers’ Information-Sharing Coalitions

Abstract

© 2018 Production and Operations Management Society In this study, we propose a stylized Cournot competition model under asymmetric market information and study the formation of producers’ informational coalitions. We offer guidance towards how the information service operations can improve the producers’ welfare. Our results shed interesting light on farmer producer organizations (FPOs) in their efforts to link farmers in developing economies by integrating market information. To be specific, by focusing on Nash equilibria wherein producers make coalition-joining decisions, we find that no information-sharing coalition will be formed when the public information provision is either too low or too high, or when the private information provision is high. When the private information provisions are endogenous, a coalition can be formed between two producers when the public information provision is high, while a fair allocation of payoff can be achieved by the dominant group architecture, but not efficiency in terms of aggregate payoff. The main theme is that the government or NGO should provide right amount of market information to the right target, and too much informational intervention leads to more inefficient production and unstable organization.