Research on Supply Chain Digital Collaborative Decision-Making Under Heterogeneous Power Structures

Against the backdrop of the digital economy, digital transformation has increasingly evolved from a firm-level upgrading process into a collaborative decision-making issue among supply chain members. From the perspective of intelligent supply chain management, this study develops a two-echelon game model of a vertical manufacturer–retailer supply chain to examine digital collaborative decision-making under heterogeneous power structures. By comparing a centralized cooperative benchmark with decentralized non-cooperative scenarios, the study investigates how power structures affect firms’ digital transformation efforts, pricing decisions, and system-level outcomes, while also considering the role of knowledge spillovers. The results show that, under the same power structure, cooperation leads to higher digital transformation effort levels and greater total supply chain profit than non-cooperation. Knowledge spillovers further strengthen firms’ incentives to invest in digital transformation and improve market demand, consumer surplus, and social welfare. Compared with asymmetric power structures, a balanced power structure generates lower retail prices, higher market demand, and better overall supply chain performance. Numerical simulations further show that higher digital transformation costs weaken collaborative gains, whereas greater market sensitivity to digitalization strengthens them. Overall, this study suggests that digital collaboration contributes to supply chain sustainability by improving coordination efficiency, enhancing adaptive operations, and promoting system-level value realization under heterogeneous governance structures.