Research On Food Safety Governance Under The Perspective Of Information Asymmetry

Food is a basic necessity for people's survival.Its safety is not only related to people's health and life security,but also affects their country's economic development and social stability.Once some food safety accident happens,many bodies of our society will have to put resources to settling down and remedying it,causing enormous social costs and welfare losses.Nowadays,China's food safety situation takes on the multiple,complex and willful characteristics.Besides the safety risks caused by the technical complexities in food production,food safety takes great reference to the enterprise's investment decision making,consumers purchasing decision making,and public administration theories,and so on,bearing the dual properties of technical support and human motivation.Making comprehensive application of information asymmetry,stakeholder actors and game theory to expand research and seek corresponding measures for food safety has been a hot point and also a difficulty currently in the field.From the viewpoints of product quality characteristics,food safety bears triple features of searching,experience and trusting.Among them,the experience and trusting characteristics usually cause information asymmetry between the supply and demand parties in the food market and in the food enterprise's internal production,which is the key factor that affects food safety's supply efficiency,leading to two striking harmful consequences,that is,the external information asymmetry between the supply and demand parties in the market lowers food safety's allocative efficiency and the internal information asymmetry between enterprises and their production staff causes low output efficiency of food safety in production.In this paper,on the basis of fully understand ing of China's food safety situations and its seriousness,taking into account food safety governance researching as the main line,combining together with careful collecting and analysis of the relevant literature in the field,from the perspective of microscopic economic behavioral analysis,to overcome the traditional economic decision making and equilibrium models' defect of focusing mainly on output yields but ignoring quality levels,and according to the principles of the reasonable persons' profit maximization and utility maximization principles,we build up and solve a general equilibrium model of quality-price-yield by taking product quality level as a new decision-making variable into the traditional economic decision making and equilibrium models of price-yield,giving the basic principles of obtaining the best yield and the highest quality level,forming a wholly new awareness of food quality and its balance in economic activity.Secondly,based on the facts that the information asymmetry between the supply and demand parties exists both in the food market and in food enterprise's internal production lines,and from the double-angles of external governance in the market and internal governance in production,we form a comprehensive food safety governance framework on both the information asymmetry in the food market and the information asymmetry in food enterprise's internal production lines.By examining the different economic behavioral characteristics of parties related in food safety issues and their impacts on its governance,we reveal,discuss and find out that the economic essence that the key of food safety governance is how to try our best to overcome the information asymmetry between different parties in the field.Then,based on the above theoretical results,we take Shanghai Fuxi expired meat incident as an example,analyze thoroughly its occurrence and development process,its social impacts,its reasons and causes,and its overcoming paths,from the respects of enterprises,consumers,governmental regulators and other community groups,and summarize its implicating values for China's food safety governance practice.Finally,under the guidance of the above comprehensive framework and the case study above,we try to do some study work and seek effective countermeasures for China's food safety problems,providing theoretical support for the design and development of food safety governance policies.This work will help analyze the efficiency of today's various policy measures,strengthen and enhance food safety governance research,and perfect China's food safety regulatory system.It has great theoretical value and practical significance.All in all,this paper has coordinated the various bodies' conductive features related in food safety issues and taken into account China's special food safety situations.It bears strong practical guiding values for today's food safety governance.Meanwhile,as information asymmetry between the supply and demand parties is the key characteristics of food safety issues,many other products,in a broader level,such as,medicines,medical services,education,and so on,also have this similar characteristics,the values of food safety research may not just be confined to the issue itself,it will also provide some insights to understand the issues in these other similar areas.