Revenue sharing contracts of green fresh product considering freshness keeping effort

We investigate a two echelon green fresh product supply chain consisting of an upstream farmer who provides green fresh product and a downstream retailer who buys green fresh product and transports, storages, sells it to the consumer and needs to pay freshness keeping effort (FKE). This paper adopts the Stackelberg model under three different scenarios to investigate the decision-making problems for decentralized supply chain. Our results demonstrate that: First, the equilibrium decisions, comprised of wholesale price, greenness improvement level (GIL) and freshness keeping effort, are the largest when under the Nash bargaining revenue sharing scenario (BS), but the least when under the retailer-led no revenue sharing case (NS). Second, the retailer earns more profit when under Nash bargaining revenue sharing scenario than the farmer-led revenue sharing model (RS), and the NS scenario is the least. Whereas, the farmer's profit under the three scenarios depends on the specific parameter values. Third, the whole channel profit is the largest when under BS case, the RS case comes next and the NS case is the least. The findings provide compelling insights into how farmer and retailer can better manage their supply chain strategies when freshness keeping is concerned.