Social co-governance for sustainable brand in food industry: dynamic evolutionary game among multiple stakeholders

Abstract

Social co-governance is imperative for the sustainable brand building. In this paper, we establish a sustainable brand system by integrating vertical and horizontal cooperation to address the issues which include the mechanism of the social co-governance and the effects of the enforcement approaches in the brand building. First, a new vertical cooperation is considered into the current paradigm of agro-food supply chain by integrating the consumers while the social co-governance is perceived as an effective way of horizontal cooperation. Then, we investigate the dynamic changes in the profitability or utility of these stakeholders in the system. Consequently, this paper designs three evolutionary models including Government-Manufacturer-Society Game (GMSG) model, Farmer Intra-group Game (FIG) model and Consumer-Market Game (CMG) model. Finally, the systemic dynamics models examine how the system performs in the different scenes. The primary results indicate the social co-governance has maximizing utility of brand construction. And the strict enforcement performs better than creative strategies in the early stages. Whereas the creative strategies outperform as the value of sustainable raw material output increases.