Green fresh product cost sharing contracts considering freshness-keeping effort

Nowadays, along with increased public demands on the high-quality green fresh product, the downstream retailer has to spend in the packaging and cold chain transportation and the upstream farmer needs to invest more in green fresh products producing. In this paper, we investigate a green fresh product supply chain problem, in which the retailer transports and sells green fresh products to the ultimate consumer while the farmer produces green fresh product through spending a greenness improvement investment and sells green fresh products to the retailer. Since the fresh product is perishable, the retailer needs to make a costly freshness-keeping effort. Obviously, the freshness-keeping effort, the price, and the greenness improvement level will affect the demand. Thus, to demonstrate the game structure between the retailer and the farmer, a decentralized model without cost sharing, a decentralized Stackelberg cost sharing model, and a Nash bargaining model with cost sharing are formulated. Results show that: (1) The equilibrium decisions under Stackelberg model with cost sharing are larger than that of the Nash bargaining model with cost sharing, while equilibrium decisions in the decentralized model without cost sharing are the least. (2) Both greenness improvement levels in Stackelberg cost sharing contract and Nash bargaining are greater than that in decentralized model without cost sharing. (3) The retailer’s profits in Stackelberg cost sharing contract and Nash bargaining are larger than that in decentralized case without cost sharing, while the farmer’s profits in Stackelberg cost sharing contract and Nash bargaining are larger than in decentralized model without cost sharing in certain conditions. Meanwhile, a numerical example is given to illustrate the results we obtained in the theoretical analysis process.