Facilitation mechanisms for supply chain resilience-oriented inputs: a digitalization and enterprise alliance based perspective

Abstract

Proactive inputs oriented toward supply chain resilience (SCR) are essential for enhancing SCR capabilities and enabling enterprises to adapt to highly uncertain environments. However, cost-benefit imbalances result in insufficient input incentives among firms. While an expanding literature examines digitalization's role in SCR, research findings remain inconsistent, complicating efforts to promote SCR-oriented proactive inputs in digital settings. The question of whether and how enterprise alliances can encourage such inputs in digital contexts remains unresolved. Based on this new reality, this study comprehensively considers the positive and negative impacts of digitalization. And analyzes the impact of the enterprise alliance mechanism in scenarios in which the market mechanism has failed. The results indicate that: (1) Digitalization exerts a significant nonlinear effect on firms' SCR-oriented proactive inputs, and this effect is bounded by two thresholds. Firms will only provide such proactive inputs when their digitalization level falls between these two thresholds. (2) The market mechanism encounters failure when the proportion of SCR-oriented proactive inputs to returns surpasses a critical threshold. This situation prompts firms to shift their behavior away from investing in resilience. (3) Enterprise alliance mechanism serves as an effective solution to address market failures, but require careful calibration of subsidy and penalty levels. This mechanism can only work if the subsidies and penalties exceed certain thresholds. However, when applied excessively, these measures have certain limitations. A medium level of subsidies and penalties can better promote SCR-oriented proactive inputs by firms. This study clarifies the conditions under which digitalization and enterprise alliance mechanisms act on SCR-oriented proactive inputs.