The Impact Of Farmers' Perception Equity On Their Speculative Behaviors In The Contracted Agricultural Product Channel

Contract agriculture has worked for a long time in China.From the perspective of marketing channel theory,the contractual channel relationship between farmers and enterprises has been formed in the order agriculture.Due to the small scale,weak strength,high degree of homogeneity and low degree of organization,farmers are in a very weak position in the channel relationship,and the channel power structure is seriously unbalanced.Researches on order agriculture shows that the stability of contractual channel relationship is low,especially the large amount of speculation in the channel relationship is an important factor affecting the performance of channel relationship.As a result,it's an important topic to restrain the peculation behavior of enterprises and farmers in the research of contractual channel of agricultural products.Existing researches mainly focus on the influence of some factors on the farmers'speculation,such as the contractual clarity,enterprises' management and control,the personal relationship between farmers and enterprises farmers,and they have also proposed many related management suggestions.However,they have not fundamentally solved these problems due to the serious tilt of power structure between farmers and enterprises.In view of this,this paper introduces the fair theory into the marketing channel of agricultural products,and combines the social exchange theory and channel governance theory into this study.Firstly,we have reviewed and sorted out the previous research literature,and put forward the research hypothesis of this paper.Secondly,we choose farmers in the channels of agricultural products as investigation objects,and make survey in 16 provinces throughout the country to collect first-hand data.And then,we use SPSS21.0 and Amos22 for statistical analysis of the collected data.We adopt the method of multiple hierarchical regression to test the proposed hypothesis.Finally,we analyze and discuss the hypothesis test results,and draw the following conclusions:(1)farmers' perceived distribution fairness has a significant negative impact on their speculative behaviors while perceived procedural fairness has no significant impact on the speculative behaviors.(2)the trust of farmers to enterprises plays a partial intermediary role between distributive fairness and the speculation of farmers.(3)asymmetry of specific asset input plays a moderating role between farmer's trust and speculation,that is,asymmetry of specific asset weakens the negative impact of farmer's trust on their speculation.According to above conclusions,we can draw the theoretical contribution of this paper,which is mainly reflected in two aspects.First,this paper has empirically tested the mechanism of the inhibiting effect of farmers' perceived fairness on their speculative behaviors,that is,to test the mediating effect of farmers' trust.This finding can enrich and expand the research literature on the speculative behavior in the contractual channel relationship of agricultural products and help to further understand the mechanism between perceived fairness and the speculative behaviors in marketing channels.Secondly,the social dimension(perceived fairness and trust)and economic dimension(asymmetry of dedicated asset investment)of channel relationship are both included in the research model,and the interaction between them is empirically tested,which is also conducive to deepening the research on the operation mechanism of contractual agricultural products channel.Accordingly,this article also has a certain practical value.For instance,we can give some possible policy recommendations in the management and the control of farmers' speculation to agricultural products purchasing enterprises.They should pay full attention to farmers' perceived fairness(including two aspects of distributive fairness and procedural fairness)levels,and promote the establishment of thefarmers'trust.Also,they should think carefully about the investment of specific assets to improve the relationship of power structure and reduce the occurrence of the farmers'speculation.At the same time,the research of this paper is also conducive to lead farmers to the cooperation with enterprises effectively,promote the establishment of harmonious cooperation atmosphere,give full play to the advantages of contract agriculture,and effectively improve the performance of contract agricultural products channel.