In practice, agency e-commerce is also referred to as e-marketplace, where copycats that have nearly identical “consumption quality” with the genuine products are commonly observed. The e-marketplace may not have incentives to combat copycats, so we observe many brands are using a truly new...

E-tailers such as Amazon and JD.com have long been criticized for the co-existence of copycat and genuine products sold on their platforms. Although many brands have developed blockchain-based digital manufacturing systems which can enable the traceability of the genuine products, consumers...

Abstract: In practice, consumption quality refers to “production quality + category image”, where the former is determined by a contract manufacturer (CM) and the latter is promoted by an industry leader. In this paper, we explore whether the industry leader should cooperate with the CM...