As a sort of special and spoiled product, fresh agricultural product has a fair corruptive and wastage character. Additionally, the fresh agricultural product supply chain exists universally the phenomenon of information asymmetry in the process of production, supply and sale, and this brings great loss to the fresh agricultural product, and brings great difficulty to the supply chain management. On the other hand, the disruptions such as SARS, H1N1 flu relating to the fresh agricultural products occur frequently in the recent year, and these disruptions make tremendous influence to the production, sale, demand and the confidence of the food safety which being cared by the consumer. So, it is very important and urgent for the fresh agricultural product supply chain to explore the strategies to coordinate the disruptions. This is just the origination of the question for the paper.
In this paper, focusing on a fresh agricultural products supply chain system composed of one supplier and one retailer which restrained by transport time, and by supposing the retailer's cost being a private information, we study how to coordinate the supply chain to response to the disruptions while they cause the retailer's cost distribution function fluctuated, in order to provide the theory basis to the decider.
A fresh agricultural product supply chain coordination model is constructed under symmetrical and asymmetric information firstly. Secondly, it is supposed that the disruption should cause the fluctuant to the retailer's cost distribution, and supply chain coordination model is proposed based on disruption environment by drawing (leading) into deviation cost so as to adjust the production plan. Finally, an optimal analysis to the model is provided and some management strategies relatively are suggested.
Based on asymmetric information of the retailer cost, firstly, the coordination model of the fresh agricultural product supply chain under symmetrical information is given. Secondly, the centralized system and the decentralized system decision mechanism are analyzed under the condition of asymmetric information. Finally, the optimal response strategy is investigated under the retailer's cost distribution fluctuation caused by disruption.
The study results show that it is the optimal decision to keep the original production plan of the fresh agricultural product supply chain based on time restrain unchanging when the expectant cost of the retailer fluctuates to a small extent with asymmetric information of the cost of the retailer, and it can keep the system operating normally. When the degree of the expectant cost fluctuation of the retailer exceeds the robustness zone, the supply chain can achieve coordination only if the original production planning, the wholesale price and the retail price must be adjusted.
In the part of data emulation and analysis, a living example according to the feature of thefresh agricultural product supply chain restrained by transport time is designed under the asymmetric information, furthermore, the influence suffered by wholesale cost, sale quantity, retail price, the supplier's expectant profit, the retailer's profit and the expectant profit of the whole supply chain system while the cost distribution of the retailer fluctuated caused by the emergent event are analyzed. Finally, the validity of the model on response to the disruption is verified.
In brief, a fundamental train of thought and a frame for coordinating the fresh agricultural product supply chain under asymmetric information to response to disruptions to the other related researches are provided in this study. Moreover, it can be used for reference to the other related studies in how to coordinating the supply chain under asymmetric information to response to disruptions.