管科系系列讲座第215期预告

 

时间:2018年9月25日(周二)13:30

地点:史带楼303

主持人:冯天俊教授(商务分析与运营创新研究中心)

主讲嘉宾:Duo Shi, Assistant Professor of Operations Management, School of Management and Economics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

TitleFood Safety Control in the Developing Economies: Centralization vs. Decentralization

Abstract: A commonly believed cause for the food safety problems in the developing economies is that the government's control system is decentralized. Unlike the developed countries where the whole food supply chain is centrally audited, different tiers of a food supply chain are usually audited by different government agencies in the developing countries such as China and Brazil. In this paper, we analytically investigate how agency structure and the food safety outcome interact by studying a canonical two-tier supply chain associated with the corresponding upstream and downstream auditing agencies. The two agencies can be decentralized, i.e., minimizing their individual agency costs, or centralized, i.e., minimizing their overall agency cost. Contrary to the common belief, we find that the decentralized food safety control system may outperform the centralized one. Two drivers of this result are identified: the supplier's strategic response to the agencies' auditing efforts, and the misalignment between the agencies' cost minimization and the food safety outcome. In addition, we find that higher auditing capabilities of the agencies may lead to a worse food safety outcome. We also propose a responsibility reallocation approach to improve the performance of the decentralized control system. Our results provide a deeper understanding of how agency structure drives food safety outcome on top of the existing cognition. 

 


管理科学系

2018-8-31