Incentive contract design for supplier switching with considering learning effect

For minimizing purchase cost, a buying firm would switch to suppliers with providing more favorable prices. This paper investigates the optimal switching decision of a buyer that may switch to an entrant supplier with production learning ability (which is regarded as a private information) under a principal-agent framework. The results obtained show that the switching cost and the learning effect have significant impacts on the buyer's switching decision. Only when the fixed component of the switching cost is relatively low, the buyer can be better off from a partial switching strategy; otherwise, the buyer should take an all-or-nothing switching strategy or no switching strategy. As the learning ability of the entrant supplier increases, the buyer prefers to make more switching. Finally, a benefit-sharing contract is proposed to evaluate the performance of the principal-agent contract, and we demonstrate that the principal-agent contract almost completely dominates the benefit-sharing contract.