报告题目：The Impact of Animal Welfare Regulations on Firms’ Product Offerings

报 告 人：林智平

报告时间：2020年10月21日（周三），10：30-12：00

报告地点：明哲楼504

主办单位：现代供应链管理研究院

【报告人简介】

林智平，厦门大学管理学博士，University of San Diego访问学者。主要研究方向为供应链金融、可持续供应链。其研究成果已发表在《管理科学学报》，《中国科学:数学》等期刊上。

【摘要】

Increased public concern over animal welfare has led to new regulations to improve animals’ living environments. We study how these regulations affect firms’ product offerings, prices, and profits and the effectiveness of offering subsidies to support regulatory compliance. We consider two competing animal agriculture supply chains, each consisting of a supplier and a buyer. The buyers initially offer one of three products—conventional, humane, or organic—differentiated by animals’ living environment and consumers’ nutritional benefits. We examine how the introduction of animal welfare regulations prohibiting the conventional product affects firms’ product offering decisions. We find that consumers’ growing awareness of the benefits of organic products encourages buyers to offer them upon the implementation of animal welfare regulations. Furthermore, we find that allowing a buyer to source from multiple suppliers benefits all suppliers. However, increasing a buyer’s order-quantity commitment to the supplier in its own channel hurts all suppliers due to intensified competition. For policy implications, we show that tightening humane product standards and loosening organic standards encourage firms to offer organic products—but with distinct pricing implications. The former leads to higher retail prices whereas the latter may lower retail prices. Furthermore, we provide guidance to regulators on the most effective subsidies to offer to the supplier, for increasing social welfare. To encourage the adoption of organic product,  regulators can use either a unit-cost subsidy or an investment subsidy. However, if regulators want to encourage the adoption of the humane product, only the unit-cost subsidy would work.