Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains
© 2019 INFORMS. Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) is a serious threat to public health. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework to examine farms' strategic adulteration behavior and the resulting EMA risk in farming supply chains. We study both "preemptive EMA," in whic...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/136284 |
| _version_ | 1811088711138410496 |
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| author | Levi, Retsef Singhvi, Somya Zheng, Yanchong |
| author2 | Sloan School of Management |
| author_facet | Sloan School of Management Levi, Retsef Singhvi, Somya Zheng, Yanchong |
| author_sort | Levi, Retsef |
| collection | MIT |
| description | © 2019 INFORMS. Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) is a serious threat to public health. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework to examine farms' strategic adulteration behavior and the resulting EMA risk in farming supply chains. We study both "preemptive EMA," in which farms engage in adulteration to decrease the likelihood of producing lowquality output, and "reactive EMA," in which adulteration is done to increase the perceived quality of the output. We fully characterize the farms' equilibrium adulteration behavior in both types of EMA and analyze how quality uncertainty, supply chain dispersion, traceability, and testing sensitivity (in detecting adulteration) jointly impact the equilibrium adulteration behavior. We determine when greater supply chain dispersion leads to a higher EMA risk and how this result depends on traceability and testing sensitivity. Furthermore, we caution that investing in quality without also enhancing testing capabilities may inadvertently increase EMA risk. Our results highlight the limitations of only relying on end-product inspection to deter EMA. We leverage our analyses to offer tangible insights that can help companies and regulators to more proactively address EMA risk in food products. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:06:20Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/136284 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:06:20Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1362842023-12-19T20:55:27Z Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains Levi, Retsef Singhvi, Somya Zheng, Yanchong Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center © 2019 INFORMS. Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) is a serious threat to public health. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework to examine farms' strategic adulteration behavior and the resulting EMA risk in farming supply chains. We study both "preemptive EMA," in which farms engage in adulteration to decrease the likelihood of producing lowquality output, and "reactive EMA," in which adulteration is done to increase the perceived quality of the output. We fully characterize the farms' equilibrium adulteration behavior in both types of EMA and analyze how quality uncertainty, supply chain dispersion, traceability, and testing sensitivity (in detecting adulteration) jointly impact the equilibrium adulteration behavior. We determine when greater supply chain dispersion leads to a higher EMA risk and how this result depends on traceability and testing sensitivity. Furthermore, we caution that investing in quality without also enhancing testing capabilities may inadvertently increase EMA risk. Our results highlight the limitations of only relying on end-product inspection to deter EMA. We leverage our analyses to offer tangible insights that can help companies and regulators to more proactively address EMA risk in food products. 2021-10-27T20:34:42Z 2021-10-27T20:34:42Z 2020 2021-04-08T14:56:05Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/136284 en 10.1287/MNSC.2018.3215 Management Science Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) SSRN |
| spellingShingle | Levi, Retsef Singhvi, Somya Zheng, Yanchong Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains |
| title | Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains |
| title_full | Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains |
| title_fullStr | Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains |
| title_full_unstemmed | Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains |
| title_short | Economically Motivated Adulteration in Farming Supply Chains |
| title_sort | economically motivated adulteration in farming supply chains |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/136284 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT leviretsef economicallymotivatedadulterationinfarmingsupplychains AT singhvisomya economicallymotivatedadulterationinfarmingsupplychains AT zhengyanchong economicallymotivatedadulterationinfarmingsupplychains |