Abstract
Cold goods manufacturers and logistics service providers are two essential groups of players in the goods safety issue in cold chains under the administration or inspection of governments and various stakeholders, including customers and final consumers. In this research, we applied the evolutionary game theory to examine the behavioral strategies of manufacturers and logistics service providers, while we formulated the governments and various other stakeholders’ impacts by contracted subsidy and penalty. First, we developed an evolutionary game theory model of the interaction between manufacturers and logistics service providers. Then, we examined the evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) of the manufacturers and logistics service providers under various constraints. Finally, we used simulation to demonstrate the impact of combinations of various parameters on the ESS and evolutionary paths. The results showed that the behavior strategies of the manufacturers and logistics service providers are interleaved and affected by the parameters in the developed model. We analyzed the ESSs and evolutionary paths by considering profits of the cold goods, the cold chain logistics costs, mainly the additional profits and costs of sharing information, and the subsidy and penalty regulated by contracts and governments. By tuning the parameters for numerical studies, we can find that the subsidy and penalty are essential for the cold chain manufactures and logistics service providers to adopt the information-sharing strategy, while the cost of the strategy and the profit of them constrains the positivity. Although, besides instant costs and profits, the information-sharing strategy can add values to cold chains in the long run, the administrators must consider the two populations of players and advocate them to adopt the information-sharing strategy consistently by using optimal policies.
Highlights
In cold chains, safety problems of fresh goods frequently happen because of the temperature out of control, especially in the logistics processes [1]
The manufacturers will make contracts with the logistics service providers to maintain the temperature during the whole logistics process so that they can control the food quality. e logistics service providers should share the information in the logistics processes to the manufacturers and related government departments, even the related customers and final consumers
Some pioneering studies have examined the technologies, devices, operations, and even information systems for cold chain logistics [8], while they did not investigate the dynamics among the main stakeholders
Summary
Safety problems of fresh goods frequently happen because of the temperature out of control, especially in the logistics processes [1]. On the manufacturer’s and customer’s sides, information transparency is a crucial way to inspect the temperature status and administrate the distributive logistics processes To study this dilemma and the mutual interactions between the manufacturers and logistics service providers in cold chains, an evolutionary game [4, 5] is used to formulate the information transparency mechanisms. Some pioneering studies have examined the technologies, devices, operations, and even information systems for cold chain logistics [8], while they did not investigate the dynamics among the main stakeholders (here manufacturers and logistics service providers). Ird, many pioneering studies using evolutionary games in supply chains provide useful references for this study, the administrators must consider the costs and benefits induced by temperature control technologies and processes and governments’ different roles to extend these existing studies to cold chains.
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