Research On Sourcing For Traceability In Food Supply Chain Considering Consumers’ Willingness To Pay

Food safety problems not only threatens the health of consumers,but also reduce the consumer’s willingness to buy food,which has a great negative impact on the reputation and economic benefits of the food enterprises.Aware of the importance and urgency of establishing traceability systems to contain and deal with food safety incidents timely the government establishes legal institutions to regulate the establishment of a food traceability system,and promotes consumers’ traceability consciousness through various propagandas to encourage consumers to buy traceable food.Food suppliers invests different input to set up traceability system according to the company’s situation,so the traceability capability of suppliers is different.As consumers’ awareness of food safety increases gradually,the traceability consciousness is goes up accordingly,which means that consumers are willing to pay higher prices for traceable food.However,there are differences in the traceability consciousness of consumers because of the different individual factors such as the educational background and income level of consumers,so there are also differences in the willingness to pay for traceability.Retailers can recall the food with quality problems through the traceability system of suppliers,but they need to bear the recall cost.The ability of traceability directly affects the accuracy of recall,and then affects the recall cost.This paper focuses on the procurement problem of retailers in the supply chain and explores the impact of consumers’ willingness to pay for traceability and extraneous loss after food safety problems on retailers’ purchasing strategies.Considering the same consumers’ willingness to pay for traceability,this paper first formulates four retailers’ purchasing strategies and profit models.These models investigate the sourcing decision of the retailer considering consumers’ willingness to pay for traceability,the portion of consumers with traceability consciousness,probability of food safety incident,and extraneous loss incurred by food safety incident.Secondly,this paper considers the different willingness to pay for traceability among consumers,which obeys the uniform distribution,demonstrating theretailer’s sourcing strategy and the conditions of its establishment,and the possible purchasing strategy of the retailer under different conditions is obtained.Then,it analyzes the influence of each factor on the selection of the retailer’s sourcing strategy,and the influence of the difference degree of the consumer’s willingness to pay for traceability on the optimal sourcing decision of the retailer.In this study,it is found that increasing consumers’ willingness to pay for traceability or expanding the portion of consumers with traceability consciousness may incur unintended consequence,such as an increase in sourcing quantity of non-traceable food product,while efforts on strengthening inspection and penalizing the retailer always lead to more supply of traceable food in the market.In addition,as consumers’ differences degree of the willingness to pay for traceability increases,retailers will gradually reduce sourcing quantity of traceable food and rise the sourcing quantity of non-traceable food.Therefore,consumers’ preference for traceability and the increase of willingness to pay can not effectively promote the supply of traceable food on the market,and it is the direction for future efforts to increase the source preference and willingness to pay for the whole consumer market to increase the supply of traceable food.