Research On Cooperative Strategy And Allocation Policy Of Agricultural Producers Under Yield Uncertainty

Agriculture is the source of human food and clothing,the foundation of survival,and the basis of national economy.However,agricultural production and management activities are often directly and closely dependent on the forces of nature,and are more easily affected by some force majeure factors in nature.Unfortunately,these force majeure factors,such as drought,earthquake,fire,storm,rainstorm,frost,hail,diseases and insect pests,have caused yield uncertainty of agricultural products.In reality,the risk caused by yield uncertainty not only seriously affects the incomes of agricultural producers,but also restricts the high-quality and rapid development of agricultural economy.Therefore,how to reduce the risk caused by yield uncertainty,stabilize the incomes of agricultural producers and promote the sustainable development of agricultural production have always been the focus of the country and society.For this purpose,this paper takes advantage of the risk pooling effect,independent agricultural producers form a coalition through cooperative strategy,and jointly provide their aggregated outputs to meet market demands or forward contracts,so as to reduce the risk caused by the uncertainty.Furthermore,this paper designs fair profit(or cost)allocation policies for the agricultural producers' coalition under single agricultural products,multiple agricultural products and price-dependent demand,respectively.Fair allocation policies not only improve the incomes of agricultural producers,but also ensure the long-term and stable development of the agricultural producers' coalition.In addition,this paper discusses the population monotonicity of the agricultural producers' coalition,which provides an incentive for the expansion of coalition.The detailed analyses and results are as follows.First,this paper investigates that a group of independent agricultural producers with single agricultural products willingly form a coalition to jointly cope with yield uncertainty.In contract farming,the agricultural producers' cooperative game problem with single agricultural products is formulated as a two-stage stochastic linear program.Using stochastic duality approach and cooperative game theory,this paper designs a fair profit allocation policy for the agricultural producers' coalition with single agricultural products.This fair profit allocation policy implies that no subset of agricultural producers has an incentive to leave the coalition,and ensures the stability of the agricultural producers' coalition with single agricultural products.Meanwhile,this paper finds that the agricultural producers' coalition with single agricultural products has population monotonicity,which means that,every time a coalition adds a new player,each agricultural producer within the coalition will obtain a better profit.Hence,the population monotonicity gives an incentive for coalition expansion.Furthermore,this paper studies the agricultural producers' cooperative game with single agricultural products under the decreasing marginal production cost.In particular,this cost structure exhibits economies of scale for production.Taking advantage of the proposed stochastic duality approach,the agricultural producers' cooperative game with single agricultural products under the decreasing marginal production cost is shown to have a nonempty core.Thus,the results not only provide a simple way to design a fair profit allocation policy for the agricultural producers' cooperative strategies with single agricultural products in contract farming,but also play an important role in the sustainable development of the agricultural producers' coalition.Then,this paper explores how independent agricultural producers with multiple agricultural products form a coalition to address the mismatch risk between uncertain yield and random demand using the risk pooling effect.The agricultural producers' cooperative games with multiple agricultural products are formulated as stochastic programming problems.When the market demands of multiple agricultural products are independent,complementary or substitutable,using the stochastic duality approach,this paper shows that the agricultural producers' cooperative game with multiple agricultural products has a nonempty core under the conditions of constant and decreasing marginal production costs,respectively,and designs a fair cost allocation policy for the agricultural producers' coalition with multiple agricultural products under different production cost structures.Specifically,this paper further shows that the agricultural producers' coalition with multiple agricultural products has population monotonicity under the constant marginal production cost.Moreover,this paper finds that the yield uncertainty and sensitivity of complementation are positively correlated with this proposed cost allocation policy and that the sensitivity of substitution is exactly the opposite.The results of this paper demonstrate that the agricultural producers' cooperative strategies can mitigate the risk caused by the uncertainty,suggesting that,for the agricultural producers facing yield and demand uncertainties of multiple agricultural products,choosing to collaborate is better than acting alone.Finally,this paper explores a scenario in which a group of independent agricultural producers faced with yield uncertainty and price-dependent demand willingly form a coalition to jointly cope with the risk caused by the uncertainty.The agricultural producers' cooperative game with price-dependent demand is also formulated as a stochastic linear program.Taking advantage of the convex programming duality theory,this paper designs a fair profit allocation policy for the agricultural producers' coalition with price-dependent demand.Furthermore,the convex programming duality theory is applied to the agricultural producers' cooperative game with price-dependent demand under the decreasing marginal production cost.In this case,the resulting agricultural producers' cooperative game is proven to have a nonempty core.In addition,when the market demand of agricultural product depends on both the selling price and the reference price(also referred to as the history price),this paper also designs a fair profit allocation policy for the agricultural producers' coalition under a reference price effect.