Bilateral information asymmetry in a Supply Chain: a review and a coordination mechanism analysis

Supply Chain coordination is an essential aspect of managing Supply Chain networks, which involves aligning the interests of multiple parties to achieve common objectives. However, coordinating a Supply Chain can be challenging, particularly when the parties involved have different information, which can lead to different bargaining powers and bilateral asymmetry of information. Despite its relevance to the current production context, few works focus on the bilateral asymmetry of information. To stimulate research in this vein, the main objective of the work concerns the identification of the main factors to set a problem statement for Supply Chain coordination problems in the presence of bilateral asymmetry and then analyse the coordination mechanism proposed in the literature for this research area for the identification of the main problem to be addressed with bilateral asymmetry of information. To achieve this goal, a literature review is presented. The analysis that the main issue concerns the lack of trust of the individual actors in the sharing of information in each with the strategic and financial motivations. Such an approach is justified by the local vision of the individual actors who fail to fully perceive the advantages of a global optimisation, and thus of the entire Supply Chain.