Abstract: In order to study the influence of the distributor's fairness preference on the cooperative advertising strategy in supply chain, a two-level supply chain cooperative advertising multi-agent model consisting of one manufacturer and two distributors is constructed. Using principal-agent theory, the cooperative advertising strategy is analyzed in the two situations of distributors fairness neutral and fairness preference under information asymmetry, and the equilibrium solution analyzed by numerical method. The results show that: when distributors have fairness preference, the advertising investment effort, the wholesale price, the advertising subsidy and the manufacturer's income are all higher than those of the corresponding level when the distributors are fairness neutral. The advertising investment effort, wholesale price, advertising subsidy and manufacturer's income increase with the increase of the degree of distributors' fairness preference. With the increase of distributors' fairness preference degree, the manufacturer reduces the total profit share of the distributors and increases the advertising subsidy of the distributors; Manufacturers' incentives to distributors are more likely to fix advertising subsidies than sharing profit related to the total profits of the supply chain. The influence of advertising flexibility in cooperative advertising strategy is also analyzed.

Key words: asymmetric information, fairness preference, cooperative advertising, multi-agent model