CUFE Business School successfully held the 14th lecture of its 2025 Excellence Academic Forum in the 615 Conference Room of the Main Teaching Building on the South Campus on the afternoon of May 23, 2025. Prof. Yang Liu was invited as the guest speaker, and teachers and graduate students from the Business School attended the event.
The lecture was chaired by Prof. Mou Shandong, the director of the Supply Chain Management Department of CUFE Business School. Before the lecture, Prof. Mou briefly introduced Prof. Yang Liu's background. Prof. Yang Liu is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the International Business School of the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), holding a doctoral degree from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include supply chain management, operations management, and the intersection of operations management and marketing. She has published over 30 SSCI/SCI papers in international authoritative journals such as Decision Sciences, Naval Research Logistics, Transportation Research Part B, and European Journal of Operational Research, and has led three research projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Prof. Yang Liu's lecture focused on "Who Benefits from Customer to Manufacturer (C2M): Platform or Manufacturer?".Customer-to-Manufacturer (C2M) models are becoming increasingly popular on e-commerce platforms. These platforms purchase private-label products (P-products) from manufacturers and sell them to customers. At the same time, manufacturers directly sell their branded products (N-products) to customers on the platform. The study focuses on C2M involving one manufacturer and one platform. The findings indicate that under the exogenous wholesale price of P- products, an increase in wholesale price benefits the manufacturer without harming the platform, promoting cooperation between both parties. When the wholesale price is endogenously determined by the manufacturer, C2M creates a win-win situation where both the manufacturer and the platform gain higher profits, and social welfare increases. Specifically, the platform always benefits from establishing P-products. When the quality of P-products is sufficiently high, the manufacturer earns higher profits in C2M than in a single-product market.
After the lecture, the attending teachers and students had an enthusiastic discussion on the interdisciplinary aspects and research directions related to Prof. Yang Liu's presentation, as well as on paper writing and submission. This further deepened the exchange between academia and practice.
The "Excellence Academic Forum" is an academic exchange platform established by CUFE Business School to fulfill its mission of "contributing new management knowledge." It aims to address cutting-edge theoretical issues in the field of business administration and organizational development challenges in Chinese enterprise management practices. The forum brings together frontier thoughts and innovative viewpoints from home and abroad to explore Chinese solutions for China's social and economic development.
