Quality Visibility Improvement with Effort Alignment and Cost-Sharing Policies in a Food Supply Chain

Improving quality visibility along a food supply chain has been considered as a critical driver of quality risk mitigation, safety and security assurance, and performance sustainability. This paper explores the coordination mechanisms in a food supply chain, where the demand and costs are sensitive to the supply chain quality visibility that depends on an upstream supplier and a downstream retailer jointly, and the effort to improve quality visibility is increasingly expensive. After comparing the centralized and decentralized supply chain models to discover an opportunity for Pareto improvement, it is proved that a pure revenue-sharing contract fails to coordinate the supply chain, while the price discount contract with effort alignment policy or effort cost-sharing policy works. The two coordinating contracts’ boundary conditions of excluding deviated actions are presented. It is shown that the contract with effort alignment policy is cheaper but more rigid, whereas the cost-sharing one allows us to arbitrarily allocate the supply chain’s profits despite more information being collected. The models are applied to a fresh chicken supply chain in order to verify their effectiveness and robustness in reality. The impacts of several specific parameters on supply chain decisions and performances are analyzed, and the results reveal some meaningful managerial implications regarding supply chain quality visibility.