Incentive mechanism on customer knowledge collaborative acquisition with relational contract under double-sided moral hazard in big data context

In the big data context, the customer data are distributed out of the enterprise boundary. It’s the key to maintain competitive advantage that applying the customer knowledge acquisition to the enterprise innovation. From the perspective of the supply chain, there is complementarity of customer knowledge for the manufacturer and the retailer. Sharing the collaborative acquisition of customer knowledge can improve the efficiency of both sides, and even of the whole system. However, since the imbalance of the information between both sides and the imbalance aggravated because of the pending verification of customer big data value, result in speculation behaviors that called bilateral moral hazard. Reasonable design of synergy incentive contract is an important way to solve bilateral moral hazard in customer knowledge collaborative acquisition. As the big data customer knowledge needs to be examined, the relational contract model of customer acquisition knowledge is established and contract analysis of the incentive effects between the formal contract and relational contract is made. Consequently, the incentive of formal contract will result in system profit loss, while relational contract incentive has positive inspiration for collaboration between the manufacturer and the retailer, which can improve the efficiency of the acquisition. In the process, when the discount rate is large enough to reach a certain threshold, the optimal system revenue can be achieved through the relational contract.