Abstract: The flourishing cross-border e-commerce creates new opportunities for Chinese brand manufacturers to enter international markets. However, Chinese brands may face a disadvantage due to asymmetric demand information when competing with local brand manufacturers. Cross-border e-commerce platforms, with their deeper understanding of overseas markets, play a crucial role in sharing market information with the entrants. We develop a cross-border supply chain model involving a Chinese brand manufacturer, a local brand manufacturer, a cross-border e-commerce platform, and consumers, and investigate the impact of information sharing strategy on pricing decisions. Our findings indicate that without information sharing, local brand manufacturer, when facing relatively low market volatility, tends to send the uniform price signal to achieve the pooling equilibrium. In scenarios with higher market volatility, the local brand manufacturer may adopt different prices to achieve a separating equilibrium, incurring signaling costs under certain conditions. In the pooling equilibrium, when the relative brand value of local products is low, the platform is more likely to share information. Our study reveals that the timely information sharing strategy can stimulate the growth of the consumer market, and ultimately achieve Pareto improvement for all three supply chain members.

Key words: cross-border e-commerce, Chinese brand manufacturer, information sharing, signaling game