Abstract
This paper develops a system dynamics framework for the closed-loop agri-food brand supply chain (AFBSC) with multiple small farmer suppliers and one core brand manufacturer, and investigates the influences of various factors including brand effort, quality elasticity, price elasticity, revenue sharing, and the number of suppliers on the system behavior. The results show: (i) food quality is determined by all farmer suppliers, who might choose hitchhiking with the prisoner’s dilemma game in a decentralized decision-making mode; (ii) brand effort to improve brand value for food quality is mainly made by the core brand manufacturer, who presents a goal-seeking system dynamics (SD) manner with oscillation behavior around the expected quality of consumers; (iii) whether farmer suppliers or brand manufacturers, the centralized decision-making mode is more useful for them to increase revenue than the decentralized one; furthermore, the shared centralized decision-making mode is most useful for them to obtain more revenue, and the brand manufacturer is still the biggest beneficiary.
Highlights
Food quality and safety are some of the main concerns of consumers and health agencies around the world [1]
The brand value is created by different actors throughout the supply chain and the magnitude of the overall added value is decided by the end-consumer’s willingness to pay [16,17,18]
This paper focuses on brand-driven decision-making to improve food quality and safety in the Chinese agri-food supply chain
Summary
Food quality and safety are some of the main concerns of consumers and health agencies around the world [1]. Sustainability 2021, 13, 10815 decision-making into the agri-food supply chain to improve food quality and safety with high efficiency. This paper focuses on brand-driven decision-making to improve food quality and safety in the Chinese agri-food supply chain. Based on the Chinese multi-small-supplier AFBSC, the purpose of this paper is threefold: (i) to explore the reasons for low-quality supply of agriculture raw materials; (ii) to analyze the SD mechanism of brand-driven quality improvement decision-making that meets the consumers’ perceptions and expectations of brand value and food products;. The section discusses the closed-loop structure of multi-small-supplier AFBSC, and the hitchhiking phenomenon of multiple farmer suppliers leading to low-quality supply of agriculture raw materials, as well as the goal-seeking SD manner of the core manufacturer’s brand-driven decision-making for quality improvement. This paper concludes with a discussion on the summary of insights from this research and the scope of further research
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