Standard Regulation And Product Liability For Food Quality And Safety

Serious food safety problems is not only hazardous to the health of consumers, but also directly affect the healthy development of China’s food industry. Deeply research on China’s food safety problems, it’s good for this sort of contradiction and conflict resolution, as well as resolving social conflicts, promoting social transformation in China and the law. After the "melamine" incident in2008, Chinese government is gradually to improve relevant laws and regulations, and relevant departments are also joint adjustment or amendment of food quality and safety standards, increase the penalties of food crime, build comprehensive fight regulatory system. Recent food safety incidents, however has some new features such as the use of new materials, new technology brings new risks, some illegal means are more subtle, such as plasticisers."Food quality and safety is stem from producing rather than the outcome of regulation". All food regulation policy and laws eventually prompting objects-food manufacturers. What kind of incentive can provide that the regulation or law focousing in food industry. In a given industry competition structure or development level, is it enough or excessive twisted of these incentive. If incentive insufficient or excessive twisted, how should regulation or law make adjustment? When the regulation or law came up with transaction cost, what kind of governance tool can make complementation?This paper consists of seven chapters and the core chapters are chapters3-6. Chapter1and2are introduction and literature review, respectively. Chapter3based on the information asymmetric problem, using the two stage vertical differences game model to explore how standard regulation affect the enterprise choice in food quality investment. The results show that under the defect governace the standard regulation should set based on the industry reality and industry competition structure.Chapter4is based on the traditional product liability analysis framework, using game theory of signal disclosure model considering when products with security risks and enterprise information disclosure or price signals of product safety risk, how the product liability system for affect enterprise incentive in information disclosure on product safety. Conclusion pointed out when enterprises face a lower cost and fault liability, the enterprise will choose to voluntarily disclose information rather than the price to show their product quality information.The first part of chapter5discusses when food hazards with uncertainty, and introduction of the judicial determination of the standard uncertainty problems, discuss when the distribution of food hazards is not in comply with symmetrical, what the correlation of incentive effect between product liability system and standard regulation. Conclusion shows that if damage distribution with enough biases, under the principle of fault liability, the enterprise will appear insufficient or excessive incentives for prevention. It is also show that when there exist uncertainty about the judicial decision criteria, the standard regulation can reduce the uncertainty and improve the inefficiency of the fault liability. The second part explore the high transaction cost problems of standard regulation and of product liability system. The analyses return to the market competition, explores the interaction between reputation and product liability with the assumption that the reputation adjustment evolves a Markovian process of past reputation and the present quality produced. Three conclusions are derived. First, there is a quality-reputation saddle point equilibrium based on the assumptions. Second, the strict product liability can reduce the reputational costs. Third, the equilibrium level of quality and reputation under strict liability are higher than that without product liability law. Finally, summarize and look forward to the future research areas.