主管:中国科学院
主办:中国优选法统筹法与经济数学研究会
   中国科学院科技战略咨询研究院

   

The Impact of Government Intervention on Quality Behavioral Decision-making in the Chinese Herbal Medicine Supply Chain

  

  1. , 066004,
  • Received:2025-01-10 Revised:2025-07-24 Accepted:2025-09-01

Abstract: Chinese herbal medicines, as the starting materials for Chinese traditional medicine tablets and Chinese traditional patent medicine, its quality is directly related to the clinical efficacy of Chinese medicine and the revitalization and development of Chinese medicine cause in China. However, the quality of Chinese herbal medicines in China is still worrying. The Annual Report on Drug Quality Failure Data released by Yaozh.com shows that Chinese herbal medicines are the hardest hit area of drug quality failure. As a social problem involving the government, enterprises, farmers and consumers, the quality of Chinese herbal medicines is difficult to be solved by the market mecha-nism alone, which requires the government to play the role of a national management department and carry out government intervention. Therefore, how government intervention will affect the quality behavior decisions of Chinese herbal medicine supply chain members and how the gov-ernment should choose the intervention strategy to promote the quality improvement of Chinese herbal medicines have become urgent questions to be answered. Aiming at the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain in which farmers have the adulteration behavior, this paper constructs game models of the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain under four government intervention strategies, namely, non-intervention, cash subsidy intervention, inspection penalty intervention, and combination of cash subsidy-inspection penalty intervention. Based on the equilibrium results of the four models, firstly, the marginal conditions for farmers to abandon adulteration under different intervention strategies are obtained. Secondly, the impact of govern-ment intervention strategies on the quality behavior decisions of the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain members is analyzed. Finally, the operational differences of the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain under different intervention strategies are demonstrated and the choice option of government intervention strategy with the optimal quality enhancement effect is given. In addition, this paper extends the above models to test the model's robustness and obtains some new significant conclusions. The main findings of this paper are as follows: 1) Government intervention is necessary for the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain, and there are threshold conditions for all three intervention strategies to make farmers abandon adulteration behavior. 2) When the government intervenes in the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain, whether it is strengthening the subsidy for the quality inspection and testing costs of Chinese medicine enterprises or strengthening the inspection penalty for the sale of low-quality Chinese herbal medicines of Chinese medicine enterprises, it will be conducive to the governance of the farmers' adulteration behavior. When the government's subsidy or inspection penalty reaches the threshold, the farmers will abandon adulteration. 3) The combined intervention strategy superimposes the effects of cash subsidy intervention and inspection penalty intervention on the adulteration behavior of farmers. The government should choose the combined intervention strategy to intervene in the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain. Moreover, under the combined intervention strategy, the government can set a high level of subsidy to allow Chinese medicine enterprises to obtain more profits while suppressing the farmers' adulteration behavior, which will contribute positively to the healthy development of the Chinese herbal medicine in-dustry. 4) When both farmers and Chinese medicine enterprises engaged in adulteration, the gov-ernment should not only make the subsidies or penalties reach the threshold, but also guide con-sumers to pay attention to the claims, in order to eliminate the adulteration behavior of both parties. Firstly, this paper can contribute to the development of quality management theory in the Chinese herbal medicine supply chain. Secondly, this paper can provide theoretical references for the government to choose intervention strategies. Finally, this paper can provide a lesson for sub-sequent similar studies in data collection and simulation application.

Key words: Chinese herbal medicine supply chain, Government intervention, Quality behavior decisions, Adulteration, Sampling