Today, consumers are increasingly demanding higher quality in fresh agricultural products. The issues that need to be addressed now are how to keep fresh products fresh and how to coordinate the operations of supply chain participants. Three decision models are developed in this paper using the Stackelberg model: supplier-led decision making, retailer-led decision making, and centralized decision making. The comparative model analysis shows the following: (1) Regardless of the decision model, the supply chain system under centralized decision-making is always more profitable than the supplier-led or retailer-led one. (2) The optimal profit and freshness preservation strategy of the supply chain system depends on the sensitivity coefficient of consumers to price and freshness. (3) Suppliers and retailers can coordinate the costs of freshness inputs according to how the cost-sharing coordination contract is structured. (4) Finally, the numerical analysis is applied to demonstrate the correction of the model.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.