Information Sharing in the Fresh Produce Supply Chain with 3PL's Fresh-keeping Effort
As the consumption level rises,the price of fresh produce is not the only concern of consumers,but the quality of fresh produce is gradually becoming a focus.In order to ensure the quality during the distribution process,fresh produce companies often choose third-party logistics(3PL)with cold chain resources to preserve freshness.3PL's fresh-keeping effort affects the demand for fresh produce,and plays an important role in the profitability of fresh produce companies as well as the overall performance of the fresh produce supply chain.However,the market demand uncertainty makes operational decisions on fresh-keeping effort and pricing dif-ficult.It may result in too much or too little investment of fresh-keeping resources,leading to efficiency loss of the fresh produce supply chain.Compared with the supplier and 3PL,the retailer has an information advantage about demand forecast and may choose to share demand information to eliminate information asymmetry.Thus,there is a contradictory question of whether the retailer shares demand forecast information with the upstream members and whether upstream members transmit information to each other.To address this problem,the information sharing strategy in the fresh produce supply chain considering 3PL's fresh-keeping effort is investigated.There are four parts as follows.First,considering the impact of the 3PL's fresh-keeping effort on freshness,a multi-subject game model of the fresh produce supply chain is established under complete information sharing strategy,partial information sharing strategy and no information sharing strategy,and the optimal pricing and fresh-keeping effort decisions are analyzed.Second,information sharing preferences of sup-ply chain members are analyzed and the retailer's information sharing strategy is investigated.Third,based on the overall performance of the supply chain under different information sharing strategies,an incentive contract is designed to adjust the information sharing strategy.Finally,the impacts of the contract on the equilibrium decisions are discussed.The results indicate that only if the potential demand is relatively high,does the 3PL have the motivation to increase the fresh-keeping effort with the freshness elasticity increasing.It suggests that the development of cold chain is better off relying on a larger fresh produce market.The results also show that information sharing always benefits for the supplier while it hurts the 3PL.It is in the retailer's best interest to share information only with the 3PL,but it cannot achieve because the 3PL will transmit the information to the supplier.As a result,when the freshness elasticity is relatively high,the retailer sharing information with both the supplier and the 3PL is the equilibrium strategy,while the freshness elasticity is relatively low,the equilibrium strategy is not to share information.The overall performance of the fresh produce supply chain is optimal when the retailer only shares information with the 3PL,so the retailer can design a transfer payment contract to circumvent the transmission of demand information between upstream members.The aim is differ-ent from the existing literature on information sharing incentives involving multiple subjects,so a new perspec-tive on information sharing in the supply chain is provided.After that,with the high market demand informa-tion,the quality of fresh produce will be improved,and the selling price of fresh produce with high freshness elasticity will be lowered.
fresh produce supply chaininformation sharingthird-party logistics(3PL)freshness-keeping effort
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