Research On Service Quality Decision-making And Government Strategy Of Elderly Care Institutions In A Competitive Environment

In recent years,the government has introduced several relevant policies to support the elderly care service,which to a certain extent has encouraged the development of the elderly care service industry.However,under the increasingly fierce competition,how to formulate more targeted incentive strategies and guide the orderly development of the elderly care industry is an important issue for research.Based on this,this paper intends to take social and for-profit old-age care institutions as research objects to explore the impact of different government strategies on their quality and pricing decisions in market competition,with a view to answering the following questions:(1)How will social and profit-oriented pension institutions make decisions on the quality and price of pension services under competition?(2)What are the effects of government pension subsidies,quality standards and punishment strategies on the quality decisions of the two types of pension structure under competition?(3)How should the government choose a strategy to encourage the elderly care institutions to improve their service quality? In order to answer the above questions,this paper firstly constructs a decision-making model for the service quality of elderly care institutions in a competitive environment,discusses the quality and pricing decisions of elderly care institutions without government support,and analyzes the necessity of government policy support.Secondly,it discusses the influence of different government intervention methods,namely subsidies,quality standards and penalties,on the decision-making of service quality in social and for-profit elderly care institutions.Finally,the Hongfeng Senior Care Service Center of Hunan Province and the Social Welfare Center of Yuhua District of Changsha City were selected as the research objects to verify the above conclusions.The main research is as follows.First,this paper studies the service quality decision-making problem of two types of elderly care institutions in a competitive environment.The study found that the intensity of price competition will motivate the two types of elderly care institutions to improve service quality,while increasing the intensity of quality competition is not conducive to the improvement of service quality.When the price competition is small,the service quality and profit of for-profit elderly care institutions will be higher than those of social elderly care institutions,but with the intensification of price competition,the service quality and profits of social elderly care institutions will be significantly improved.Further discussing the problems existing in the service quality of elderly care institutions,it is found that the elderly care market has problems such as insufficient conversion of potential demand,high operating costs,and fierce market competition.It is caused by reasons such as preference,the difference in price and quality preference of the elderly,and the traditional concept of self-sufficiency in the elderly,which demonstrates the necessity of government intervention in the development of the elderly care industry,and lays a foundation for follow-up research.Second,this paper studies the impact of government pension subsidy strategies on the service quality of pension institutions.Pension subsidies can motivate pension institutions to improve service quality and thus obtain higher profits.Under the subsidy for the quantity of services,the service quality of social elderly care institutions is always higher than that of forprofit elderly care institutions;under the subsidy for service quality,its development trend is similar to the situation without government subsidies;the difference in the service quality level of social and for-profit elderly care institutions is small in the initial stage,but the gap will increase significantly as the intensity of price competition increases.Comparing the service quality and profit under the three government subsidy strategies,the social-type elderly care institutions have the highest level of service quality under the government’s “service quantity+service quality”combined subsidy situation,and the social-type elderly care institutions under the government’s service quantity strategy and the profit-oriented elderly care institutions have the highest level of service quality.The profits of pension institutions are always higher than the other three cases,followed by the government subsidy strategy of “service quantity+government service quality”,government service quality subsidy strategy and no government subsidy strategy.Third,study the impact of government quality standard strategies on the service quality of elderly care institutions.Firstly,the quality standards set by the government cannot always motivate pension institutions to improve their service quality.For example,under some quality intervention strategies,social pension institutions will reduce their service quality.Both will reduce the quality of service to make up for the loss caused by price competition.Secondly,under the strategy of government quality standards,social elderly care service institutions are willing to provide higher quality services,but with the increasingly fierce price competition,their service quality level is lower than that of for-profit elderly care service institutions.Thirdly,quality competition has a very small impact on profit-oriented elderly care service institutions,and has a greater impact on social elderly care service institutions.Fourthly,from the perspective of optimal profits,the government quality standard strategy can motivate two types of elderly care service institutions to increase their profits.Fourth,this paper studies the impact of government punishment strategies on the service quality of elderly care institutions under comprehensive consideration of subsidies and quality standards.With the improvement of price competition intensity and consumers’ quality preference,the profits of elderly care institutions will increase,but when the quality competition intensity and cost coefficient increase,the profits will decline.The impact of the government penalty factor on profits varies under different subsidy strategies.Under a high-standard strategy or a strategy in which oneself provides services at a high standard while competitors provide services at a low standard,the penalty factor will not affect the profits of pension institutions,but When it provides services at a low standard,its profit and punishment coefficient have a U-shaped relationship,that is,when the punishment is not high,the profit of the pension institution will decrease with the increase of punishment,but with the increase of punishment,the profit will gradually rise.Fifth,this paper analyzes the incentive effect of different government policies on the service quality of elderly care institutions based on cases.A case study is made on a social pension institution(Yuhua District Social Welfare Center)and a profit-oriented pension institution(Hongfeng Pension Service Center).The results show that under different government subsidy,intervention or punishment strategies,with the change of different parameter values,the theoretical results and the actual data of the cases basically keep the same trend.