The Coordination Mechanism of Fresh Agricultural Products Supply Chain: A Game-Theoretic Approach Considering Retailer’s Fairness Concern and Price Competition

As consumers place a growing emphasis on the freshness of agricultural products, effective freshness-keeping strategies have become crucial for improving product quality and boosting supply chain profitability.This study aims to analyse how the retailer's fairness concerns affect freshness-keeping efforts and pricing strategies in the fresh agricultural products supply chain and to explore effective supply chain coordination mechanisms to increase overall profits.This study explores a fresh agricultural products supply chain with a dominant supplier and a retailer, analysing three decision-making scenarios: centralised, decentralised with retailer fairness neutrality, and fairness concern.The research findings indicate: (1) the prices, freshness-keeping efforts, and the profit of both parties all increase as the coefficient of consumer freshness preference increases; (2) the retailer's fairness concern negatively affects supplier prices, freshness efforts, and profits, while enhancing retailer profit; (3) introducing a cost-sharing contract can promote the freshness of agricultural products, increasing sales; (4) The price difference between competing fresh products positively influences the market share of product 1.Numerical analysis results corroborate these conclusions.