Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION ECONOMICS
Volume 213, Issue -, Pages 23-31Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2019.03.005
Keywords
Platforms; Sharing economy; Social welfare; Product leftover management
Categories
Funding
- Research Grants Council (Hong Kong) - General Research Fund [PolyU 152294/16E]
- National Natrual Science Foundation of China [:71501097]
- Beijing Municipal Commission of Education in China [CITTCD201804043]
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For many food products, such as fresh vegetable and fruit, proper handling of product leftovers is critical. In recent years, food leftover sharing (FLS) platforms that can provide a means to collect the unsold food products from individual retailers and create values from them have emerged. Motivated by this real world observation, we build a single supplier multi-retailer analytical supply chain model to explore the value of this kind of FLS platform. In the decentralized supply chain setting, we prove that the presence of FLS platform is beneficial to the retailers, the supplier, the consumers and the environment. Whether it benefits the supply chain economically depends on the logistics costs (incurred from the food product leftover collection by the FLS platform). We extend the analysis to the case with a centralized supply chain and show that the FLS platform is guaranteed to help improve the environment, but the consumers and the supply chain are only benefited when the logistics costs are sufficiently small. Sensitivity analyses are conducted which show that for both centralized and decentralized supply chain settings, the FLS platform is especially helpful in enhancing social welfare when the unit food product leftover cost is higher, the unit benefit derived from reusing the food product leftovers is higher, or the unit logistics cost is lower. We further consider the case when the logistics cost with the use of platform is high, propose the use of government sponsors to help and provide the conditions under which this sponsor is well-justified with respect to social welfare enhancement.
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