Analysis Of Barriers In Consumers' Access To Food Safety Information And Potential Solutions

Food and food safety has an intimate relationship with both the livelihood of citizens and the domestic economy,such that it impacts not only the health and safety of consumers,but also the economic development and social stability of a nation.As the oldest and most important commodity,it intertwines with the human condition.In recent years,food safety incidents occurred frequently.In food market,food products do not meet safety regulations,nor does production techniques meet an adequate level of technology and manufacturing.As a consequence,food safety is the subject of widespread attention and research of domestic and foreign experts and scholars.The distinctive production and distribution characteristics of food products are fundamentally different to other manufactured goods.First,food products are perishable goods requiring technical knowledge and turnaround time to examine and criticize.Second,advances in manufacturing is leading to an increase in variety and complexity and decrease in transparency.Considering this,researchers conclude that food safety issues mainly arise from the presence of information barriers,which manifests in three ways: incomplete information,information asymmetry and low efficiencies in information communication,and corresponding solutions have been proposed.However,the perspectives of previous research and solutions have been largely confined to the perspective of government and enterprises,and there is a critical lack of analysis over the participants of the entire market.This paper attempts to use game theory model to analyze how to protect consumer's right of information,and solve the information barriers of food safety problems at the same time.Through using game theory model to analyze all the participates in food market,this paper has several conclusions.Those conclusions show that barriers are closely related to the action of the government,companies and consumers.Actions include protectionism and rent-seeking in local governments,corporate defaults in companies and unconscious in consumers.Based on the conclusions,associated with the successes of developed economies in mitigating information barriers in the food market,this paper puts forward several policy suggestions.Information disclosure system should be established to prevent risk,to strengthen information disclosure.Establish the supervision of the whole-some quality control to accomplish “four statuses and one system”.