Quality Improvement of Agricultural Products Supply Chain Under Social Preference and CSR by Big Data Analysis

Introduction

With the rapid economic development and material enrichment, consumers' demand for agricultural products has changed from quantity satisfaction to quality improvement. In recent years, quality and safety incidents caused people to worry about the quality and safety of agricultural products, such as “Lean meat powder ” incident (Zheng and Zhang, 2015), “Poisonous ginger” incident (Pu et al., 2014), “Unclear labeling” incident (Chen et al., 2014), “Fake wine” incident (Lin et al., 2015), “Saccharin jujube” incident (Li, 2017), “Poisonous bean sprout” incident (Shi et al., 2019), and so on. Incomplete legal system, inadequate supervision, and asymmetry information are certainly important, but the root of the problem is the lack of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the poor quality control of agricultural products. When enterprise actively fulfill CSR, they will not only pay attention to their own interests, but also improve the interests of other relative stakeholders, such as consumers, cooperative partners, and so on (Pino et al.2016). Some researches proved that enterprises with strong consumer awareness and active CSR commitment can obtain greater enterprise value (Liu et al. 2019), and especially can improve quality efforts by increasing quality input, which can not only ensure the supply and circulation of high-quality agricultural products, but also publicize and establish corporate image and improve market share by big data analysis based on internet.

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. It is important to consider social preference in the agricultural products supply chain. Besides, the big data technology can help us to obtain the relative information of the social preference to optimize the quality decision and supply chain operation. Therefore, it is necessary to study the influence mechanism of CSR and social preference (altruistic reciprocity and fairness concern) on the quality of agricultural products by big data analysis, so as to provide a new perspective and theoretical basis of micro motivation for further improving the quality of agricultural products, ensuring the long-term stable supply of high-quality agricultural products, and optimizing the operation of agricultural products supply chain.