We consider an agricultural supply chain consisting of a capital‐constrained smallholder farmer and an intermediary platform. The smallholder farmer sells agricultural products through the intermediary platform but lacks financial resources for planting. In addition to traditional bank financing (provided by a bank), the creditworthy intermediary platform can provide loans directly to the farmer (known as direct financing) or serve as a guarantor if the farmer's creditworthiness is insufficient to access bank loans (known as guarantor financing). We show that under guarantor and direct financing, the smallholder farmer's production level can be even higher than that in a centralized system. The farmer prefers direct financing when the production cost is low but the unit commission fee is sufficiently high. Otherwise, he prefers guarantor financing. The intermediary platform will encourage the farmer to resort to bank financing when the farmer's production cost is sufficiently high and the commission fee is low. Otherwise, it will provide direct financing. Guarantor financing makes the platform weakly worse off than direct financing and will be adopted only when the platform is also capital‐constrained. The involvement of the intermediary platform significantly improves the welfare of the farmer and the total profit of the supply chain. Moreover, the increased concern for social responsibility of the intermediary platform can lead to a win‐win‐win outcome for the farmer, the platform, and the whole supply chain.

imchen@ust.hk C onsumers seek for not only base functionalities of products they buy but also fairness in transactions. In this work, we investigate how such fairness-seeking behavior affects a manufacturer's distribution channel structure selection. Specifically, the manufacturer can sell the product directly to consumers (named direct selling) or via a middleman retailer (named agent selling). The manufacturer then decides which distribution channel to adopt with an aim to maximize his profit. Under a newsvendor framework, the distribution channel structure endogenizes the procurement cost and thus impacts consumers' fairness perception and willingness to pay. Interestingly, we show that it may be in the manufacturer's best interest to downward decentralize his distribution channel by adopting agent selling when consumers are extremely fairness-minded. However, when the consumer's fairness concern is weak, direct selling is preferred by the manufacturer. We further show that the above results qualitatively hold when we take into consideration the downstream competition, the dominance of the manufacturer in retail pricing and the heterogeneity of the consumers in their fairness seeking.

I n this study, we investigate a seller's voluntary disclosure strategy when serving two groups of consumers who arrive sequentially and are reference dependent with respect to product quality. Consumers may be naive or sophisticated, depending on whether they can make rational inferences from the seller's disclosure behavior and an experienced consumer's quality review. We show that when consumers are naive, the seller can strategically withhold high-quality information and disclose low-quality information to boost the reference-dependent early adopter's subjective quality review, which in turn enhances the follower's quality expectation and allows the seller to extract more surplus in the second period. However, when consumers are sophisticated, it is difficult for the seller to enhance their quality expectations by designing his disclosure strategy to manipulate the early adopter's quality review. The seller discloses all the quality information to consumers. When the market contains both naive and sophisticated consumers, the seller is able to withhold relatively low-quality information in advance. In such a situation, the seller exclusively serves naive customers in the first period by charging a high retail price. The earlier results are quite robust, regardless of whether the review rating is bounded or whether consumers possess heterogeneous preferences with respect to product quality.

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Purpose This paper aims to generate novel insights in supply chain management by reviewing studies related to counterfeiting and piracy issues with a particular emphasis on theoretical works. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review of more than 100 peer-reviewed academic papers is conducted. The authors first introduce the social acceptance of counterfeiting and piracy to explain the existence of these illegal products. After that, they focus on the negative effect of counterfeiting and piracy on supply chain management and society while mentioning their positive and normative effects carefully under certain circumstances. Findings People have been attempting to reveal the impacts of counterfeiting and piracy on customers, licit firms, industry sectors, governments and the society as a whole. The negative impacts of counterfeiting and piracy on legal firms and licit supply chains is examined thoroughly in the literature; however, benefits from counterfeiting and piracy are also pointed out. Additionally, researchers are interested in firms’ reactions toward this phenomenon. Based on heuristics from the above analysis, it is fruitful to conduct this research in a theme of supply chain management. Originality/value Most studies on counterfeiting and piracy are not from a supply chain management perspective and mainly focus on their effect on consumers or a single firm. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of few studies that incorporate the key aspects of counterfeiting and piracy into supply chain management and also highlight several important directions for future research in the sense of supply chain.

Problem definition: This paper investigates how counterfeits influence a global supply chain and how the supply chain should effectively take anticounterfeit actions. Academic/practical relevance: The impacts of counterfeiting have been increasingly profound on global supply chains. It is critical to understand how counterfeiting impacts supply chains when supply chain members act in their own interests, and how supply chains can effectively combat counterfeiting when all the members can contribute to it. This is the first paper that offers insights into these important questions. In particular, we examine who among the supply chain members is in the best position to perform counteracting activities, how these members can cooperate in anticounterfeiting, and what economic implications the anticounterfeit actions have to the supply chain, individual firms, consumer surplus, and social welfare. Methodology: We consider a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, and analyze a game-theoretical framework to derive the equilibrium. Results: The manufacturer prefers to induce the retailer to combat counterfeits rather than to combat itself. Contrary to conventional wisdom, counterfeits can increase the supply chain’s profit even in the absence of network externality effects. The crux is that the manufacturer lowers wholesale price to incentivize the retailer’s counteraction and, consequently, the threat of counterfeits can mitigate double marginalization and benefit the supply chain. Managerial implications: Our results demonstrate that a sustainability risk can trigger collaborative endeavors of supply chain members and thus be advantageous to the supply chain. The findings also underscore the important role that retailers should play in anticounterfeiting. Particularly, it can be in the supply chain’s interest that the manufacturer does not execute the counteraction, either jointly with the retailer or by itself.

PurposeThis paper, with the tobacco industry as the background, establishes an indicator system for tobacco supply chain performance evaluation using the FAHP method.Design/methodology/approachBased on the relevant data of tobacco enterprises in Guangxi, the paper calculates the performance values of tobacco companies in various cities of Guangxi, and through the analysis of each indicator and the performance values of each city, the authors find that the improvement ability has a major impact on tobacco supply chain performance. Then, the paper establishes a system dynamics model to further demonstrate the impact of information digitalization on the performance of the tobacco supply chain in Guangxi, thus providing theoretical support for building digital tobacco logistics in Guangxi.FindingsThe findings of the study show that the performance of the tobacco supply chains in various cities of Guangxi is generally at the level of “Pass–Good,” which can barely meet the requirements of tobacco supply chain operation, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.Originality/valueThe authors show that digital and IT-based empowerment can maximize the performance of Guangxi's tobacco logistics performance.