The Social Effects Of Implementation Of Minimum Quality Standard Based On Different Types Of Consumers

With the development of the national economy and the improvement of the income level of residents,consumers’ demands for food quality continuously increase. But for the sake of gaining more economic benefits,they adopt the mode of production of endangering the lives and health of consumers.The unsafed production behavior has triggered a series of food safety issues. In order to ensure the safe production of food enterprises and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of consumers,the governments set minimum quality standards for the food industry trying to eliminate the hidden dangers of food safety from the source.The paper takes the food industry which is most close to the consumer life as an example,on the base of taking full account of the market in the presence of the degree of product quality attention to different consumers.The consumers are divided into two types which are sensitive to products of high quality or low quality.We explore the impact of different types of consumer behavior on the implementation of the Minimum quality standards for the government in the duopoly food market. Firstly,we incorporate different consumer behavior into consumer utility function and use the oligopoly game model of making products’ prices in the first stage and products’ qualities in the second stage to calculate the social effects before and after the implementation of the minimum quality standards.Then we analyse of the influencing factors of the minimum quality standards and determine the minimum quality standard threshold which can improve the social welfare.Secondly,we calculate the manufacturer’s profits, consumer surplus and total social welfare before and after the implementation of the minimum quality standards.Then,by making trend charts to explain th e implementation of the minimum quality standards for manufacturers’ profits, consumer surplus and social welfare.At last,we compare the social effects of markets consisted of different types of consumers with the implementation of minimum quality standards and make policy recommendations to improve social welfare.The results of the study show that :(1)The implementation of minimum quality standards in the markets consist of different types of consumers causes varying degrees of decline in the profits of manufacturers and the rise of consumer surplus and social welfare in varying degrees.(2)In the markets consist of different types of consumers,with a higher proportion of sensitive consumers, the minimum quality standard threshold for the improvement of social welfare and profits of different manufacturers showed varying degrees of decline,but the consumer surplus and social welfare increase with the proportion of sensitive consumers rises.(3)The factors affecting the level of social welfare mainly include the threshold value of minimum quality standard, low-quality manufacturers’ technical level factor and the sensitive consumers’ coefficient ratio. From the perspective of improving the general welfare of the society,we should make the minimum quality standard of reasonable level,improve the technical level of low quality vendors and increase the proportion of sensitive consumers in the markets.