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Top1. Introduction
With the rapid economic and social development and the continuous improvement of living standard, consumer's demand for agricultural products has shifted from availability and diversity to safety and quality (Sun et al., 2008; Wang, 2018). In recent years, quality and safety incidents have caused people to worry about the quality and safety of agricultural products (Li, 2017; Henson et al., 2005). Incomplete legal system, inadequate supervision, and asymmetry information are certainly important, but the root of the problem lies in the supply chain management of agricultural products, and thus it is important and fundamental measure to solve the quality and safety problem of agricultural products from perspective of supply chain. Although more and more scholars put forward effective strategies and suggestions to control and improve the quality of agricultural products from supply chain, but the current research did not consider the effect of social preference on the quality of agricultural products. So far, many behavior game experiments proved the decision maker has the fairness concern, altruistic reciprocity, sympathy, jealous, guilty, etc., and the fairness concern and altruistic reciprocity is the most important and popular type of social preference (Loch and Wu, 2008). These experiments proved the decision makers are bounded rationality, i.e. when they make decision, they not only consider to maximize the own profit, but also care the benefit of other relative entities (Ho and Su, 2009). On the one hand, an important reason for the quality of agricultural products is that some supply chain members perceive the unfair distribution of channel profit and make decision that may impair the quality of agricultural products, so the fairness concern is very important for the supply chain operation (Zheng and Zhang, 2012; Chen et al., 2014). On the other hand, there exists so much cooperation and altruistic reciprocity in the supply chain so as to keep long-term cooperation and stable supply chain operation. so it is important to consider social preference in the agricultural products supply chain.
This study aims to study bilateral quality efforts decision of agricultural products supply chain based on the main operating mode of the agricultural products supply chain, i.e. "agricultural product producer and processor (hereafter, we call it as A3P) + supermarket" under social preference. For the fairness concern and altruistic reciprocity is the most important and popular type of social preference, and thus we focus on the effect of fairness concern and altruistic reciprocity on the bilateral quality efforts decision. Firstly, we set the basic model to get the optimal bilateral quality efforts decision without considering the social preference. Secondly, we set the comparative model by considering the A3P’s fairness concern and supermarket’s altruistic reciprocity respectively, and study the compact of social preference on bilateral quality efforts decision, profit, efficiency and fairness of agricultural products supply chain. Thirdly, we apply numerical analysis to verify our propositions and conclusions. Finally, we propose some management strategies to improve the quality of agricultural products by considering social preference.
Our contribution lies in three aspects: Firstly, most of traditional research on quality control focused on the unilateral quality efforts of agricultural products supply chain, i.e. only from the supplier or seller respectively, but we study the bilateral quality improvement mechanism. Secondly, the traditional quality decision of agricultural products supply chain did not consider the social preference, which will obviously influence the decision making, so we will consider the social preference (fairness concern and altruistic reciprocity) in the decision of quality effort improvement so as to conduct the research more in line with the actual decision-making psychology in advance, and further improve the quality of agricultural product. Finally, we proposed the efficiency and fairness of agricultural products supply chain, which can be used to measure the performance of agricultural products supply chain.