Addressing Daigou from the Perspective of Channel Competition: Strategy for Retail Management

In China’s on-demand service platforms, daigou agents utilize locational differences through proxy purchasing. Daigou creates an informal supply chain that directly competes with official channels. This study incorporates daigou arbitrage into the channel competition framework via a multi-stage Stackelberg game-theoretic model. An analysis of the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium shows that daigou activity disrupts the manufacturer’s profits. We have thus developed a strategy based on mathematical optimization and compared its effectiveness and side effects with those of existing methods. We came to identify purchase restrictions as one of the most powerful strategies. Equilibrium analysis and numerical experiments confirm that proper purchase restriction choices reduce daigou arbitrage and minimize negative impacts on legitimate demand. This work provides the first game-theoretic model that integrates informal proxy-purchase supply chains into dual-channel competitions.