Research On Incentive And Supervision Of Food Quality In Food Supply Chain From Consumers’ Perspective

In recent years, there are increasing problems about food quality, which attracts moreand more attention on food safety at home and abroad. Consumers, who are in the terminalend of food supply chain, are always the victims in food safety issues because ofasymmetric information. Therefore, consumers are more motivated to promote improvingfood quality and protect their interest. From the consumers’ perspective, combiningConsumer Behavior Theory and Game Theory, this paper analyzes the reason of foodsafety problem, studies that how consumers’ purchase behavior promote food quality infood supply chain, and how the government’s supervision ensure food safety under theconsumer feedback mechanism.In the first, related theory such as Supply Chain Management and Consumer Behaviorare briefly introduced, and related literature on supply chain coordination, food safety andsupply chain member’s behavior are summarized, which lays theory foundation for laterstudy.There is a signaling game between food consumer and food producer in food market.Assuming that consumers make their purchase decision after collecting information aboutfood quality in food market, this paper discusses the condition where each of the threeequilibriums in signaling game emerge, points out consumers’ optimal purchase strategy,and analyzes the reason of food quality problem. The result suggests that, in order toimproving food quality, the government should strengthen supervision, provide the highquality food producer with incentive and subsidy, and perfect the access system of foodmarket.Introducing consumer’s perception as a parameter, the paper assumes that consumerscan perceive food quality and the cost of recognition is low. Considering a food supplychain consist of producers, retailers and consumers, this paper firstly analyzes that how consumer’s purchase behavior promotes competition between food retailers and thenimproves food quality. The result is that the retailers divide the whole market profit evenlyin the end. Next, this paper presents a Stackelberg model in which the food producer is theleader and the retailer is the follower. It turns out that revenue sharing contract coordinatesthe food supply chain. Under the revenue sharing contract, consumers can purchase thesame quality food with less money, so the rational consumer would purchase food providedby the supply chain under revenue sharing contract, which is beneficial to promoting foodquality in food supply chain.What should the government to promote the food quality under consumer feedback?After purchasing and experiencing the food, the consumer provides feedback to thegovernment, and the government punishes or rewards the food producer according toconsumers’ feedback. The analysis of supervision game between food producer andgovernment supervision department reveals that, adding the penalty of punishing foodproducer for unsafe food can increases the probability of producer standardize foodproduction in the short run, but decreases the probability of government efficientsupervision in the long run, which leads to a paradox. But the analysis of trust and agencymodel gives a solution, strengthening the punishment for government supervisiondepartment’s dereliction of duty will improve government supervision efficiency. Thestudy also reveals that, government providing reward to food producer has a negative effectin the short run, but has a positive effect of promoting food quality in the long run.At last, a brief summary of our study and future research are pointed out.