Referral service of infomediary in B2C supply chain

Considering an infomediary provides demand referral to retailer in B2C supply chain, a horizontal cooperation model with marketing effort effects for dual-channel supply chain was established, and then the optimal decisions of infomediary’s effort and retailer’s order quantity in centralised and decentralised supply chain were analysed. Moreover, a horizontal cooperation contract based on sharing marketing effort cost as well as unit referral service price was developed to coordinate the supply chain. The results revealed that the contract contributed to profit optimisation of supply chain and effective dual-channel win-win cooperation. Additionally, our numerical results show that the effort efficiency of infomediary and demand correlation between dual-channel may increase the service price and a larger range of price may benefit both parties in horizontal cooperation in the dual channel.