This paper presents a comprehensive review of emerging technologies for the internet of things (IoT)-based smart agriculture. We begin by summarizing the existing surveys and describing emergent technologies for the agricultural IoT, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, wireless technologies, open-source IoT platforms, software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) technologies, cloud/fog computing, and middleware platforms. We also provide a classification of IoT applications for smart agriculture into seven categories: including smart monitoring, smart water management, agrochemicals applications, disease management, smart harvesting, supply chain management, and smart agricultural practices. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward supply chain management based on the blockchain technology for agricultural IoTs. Furthermore, we present real projects that use most of the aforementioned technologies, which demonstrate their great performance in the field of smart agriculture. Finally, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions for agricultural IoTs.

Internet of Things for the Future of Smart Agriculture: A Comprehensive Survey of Emerging Technologies

This paper provides a systematic review and analysis of the game-theroy-based research in Green Supply Chains Management (GSCM). Based on a rigorous content analysis of 108 papers carefully selecte...

Game theory-based models in green supply chain management: a review of the literature

Green innovation, implemented by enterprises, contributes to sustainable development and environmental protection. However, because of the high cost and high risk of green innovation, enterprises are reluctant to step into green innovation activities in practice. Government subsidies are conducive to promoting green innovation in enterprises. To investigate firms’ preferences for green innovation, we consider a three-player game in a supply chain where a government offers subsidies (price, innovation, or both subsidies) to a manufacturer and a retailer, while the latter two players cooperate with each other through contracts (revenue-sharing and cost-sharing contracts). By exploring the impacts of government subsidies and cooperative contracts on the optimal level of green innovation efforts and profits of participants, we find that: (1) for green innovation that leads to increased production costs, the government should subsidize both the retailer and the manufacturer to improve the level of green innovation; (2) the revenue-sharing contract is more effective than the cost-sharing contract under the premise of government subsidies; and (3) the revenue-sharing ratio decreases in production and innovation costs, while the cost-sharing ratio increases in these two costs.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/20/5584/pdf

What Drives Green Innovation? A Game Theoretic Analysis of Government Subsidy and Cooperation Contract

This paper examines the manufacturer’s channel strategy as it considers introducing an online channel to sell its own national brand (NB) product, when the brick-and-mortar retailer sells both the ...

Manufacturer’s channel strategy with retailer’s store brand

Past, present, and prospective themes of sustainable agricultural supply chains: A content analysis

Nowadays, along with increased public demands on the high-quality green fresh product, the downstream retailer has to spend in the packaging and cold chain transportation and the upstream farmer needs to invest more in green fresh products producing. In this paper, we investigate a green fresh product supply chain problem, in which the retailer transports and sells green fresh products to the ultimate consumer while the farmer produces green fresh product through spending a greenness improvement investment and sells green fresh products to the retailer. Since the fresh product is perishable, the retailer needs to make a costly freshness-keeping effort. Obviously, the freshness-keeping effort, the price, and the greenness improvement level will affect the demand. Thus, to demonstrate the game structure between the retailer and the farmer, a decentralized model without cost sharing, a decentralized Stackelberg cost sharing model, and a Nash bargaining model with cost sharing are formulated. Results show that: (1) The equilibrium decisions under Stackelberg model with cost sharing are larger than that of the Nash bargaining model with cost sharing, while equilibrium decisions in the decentralized model without cost sharing are the least. (2) Both greenness improvement levels in Stackelberg cost sharing contract and Nash bargaining are greater than that in decentralized model without cost sharing. (3) The retailer’s profits in Stackelberg cost sharing contract and Nash bargaining are larger than that in decentralized case without cost sharing, while the farmer’s profits in Stackelberg cost sharing contract and Nash bargaining are larger than in decentralized model without cost sharing in certain conditions. Meanwhile, a numerical example is given to illustrate the results we obtained in the theoretical analysis process.

Green fresh product cost sharing contracts considering freshness-keeping effort

With the development of e-commerce, a growing number of suppliers have begun to initially establish their own direct channels, competing with their retail channels. However, while this encroachment endows the suppliers with an efficient method to control downstream competition and total production output directly, it may hurt the retailer due to the loss of monopoly in the retail market. This inconsistency presents a difficulty in reaching equilibrium. In this paper, we focus on the combined effects of the risk attitudes and upstream production investment of supply chain members on supplier encroachment and verify the existence of “win–win” results for both supplier and retailer. We find that, while the two parties cannot simultaneously benefit from supplier encroachment in the absence of upstream investment, they can obtain a Pareto improvement from it in the presence of upstream investment and spillover effect. Regarding risk attitudes, we find that both the supplier and the retailer can reach agreement on the supplier encroachment in the case of a moderate confidence level. In other words, the not too risk-loving and not too risk-averse supply chain members are more likely to obtain a Pareto improvement.

Effects of risk attitudes and investment spillover on supplier encroachment

To maintain the competence, an increasing number of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) outsource their production manufacturing to contract manufacturers (CMs). While the outsourcing strategy benefits the manufacturers greatly, it also brings huge risk derived from uncertain environment, which may directly affect the supply chain members’ competitive profits and then their leadership preferences in competition. To address this problem, this paper considers a model in which an OEM outsources its production partly to a competitive CM (CCM), who also sells her own products; moreover, they hold different risk attitudes toward the uncertain demand, characterized by the confidence level in the framework of uncertainty theory. Based on the framework, to explore the OEM’s and the CCM’s leadership preferences, we derive and compare the simultaneous game, the OEM-as-leader game and the CCM-as-leader game. We present an interesting insight that, with a high wholesale price, the leadership position is more attractive for a relatively risk-aversion OEM and a relatively risk-loving CCM, which demonstrates contrary effects of both one’s risk attitudes. Furthermore, we also find that both the OEM and the CCM would like to play the leadership when both the wholesale price and the outsourcing rate to the CCM is relatively low. However, in the case of a relatively high outsourcing rate and wholesale price, both parties would like to compromise to move last rather than sticking on moving first.

Effect of risk attitude on outsourcing leadership preferences with demand uncertainty

Slope stability assessment is a difficult geotechnical problem because of the many uncertainties involved. The uncertainties associated with soil parameters are significant, originating from limited and imprecise information, which allows for the soil parameters to be expressed as uncertain variables. The distributions of these uncertain variables are built on the basis of the structure of the soil layers of a slope, and the safety factor of slope stability is defined as a ratio of resisting and acting moments under uncertain environments. The expected value of the safety factor is therefore calculated by utilizing the operational laws of the uncertain variables. The concept of the reliability index of slope stability is also introduced in order to evaluate the risk of slope instability. Three numerical examples, including a homogeneous slope and two non-homogeneous slopes, are used to verify the proposed model; meanwhile, the results are compared with those of the Fellenius method. The numerical results indicate that the proposed model can not only improve the reliability of the calculated safety factor but also reduce the computational complexity compared to deterministic methods. Fifteen project instances taken from the literature are used to investigate the validity of reliability index, and the results illustrate that the reliability index is another useful indicator to assess the stability of a slope.

Assessment of slope stability under uncertain circumstances

Despite abundant research on the relationship between CSR and firm performance, prior research generated highly inconsistent findings. No consensus has been achieved on the relationship between CSR and firm performance. The objective of this research is to examine how the relationship between CSR and firm performance is contingent on founders’ management roles, especially in the situation of the founder as CEO, which will provide insights into the inconsistent impacts of CSR. Based on panel data analysis, we empirically test the nonlinear relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm performance for China’s Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) listed companies. We further explore how this relationship differs under two types of CEOs: founder CEOs and non-founder CEOs. Our econometric analysis produces two major findings. First, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between CSR and firm performance. Second, the presence of founder CEO weakens the relationship between CSR and firm performance, making the inverted U-shaped curve flatter. This research makes both novel theoretical and practical contributions to entrepreneurship and organization research by providing an enriched understanding of the relationship between CSR and firm performance. It integrates multiple theories to create a framework within which the contingent impacts of CSR can be holistically understood. It also helps managers to realize the nonlinear economic consequences of CSR activities and the different regulatory effects of founder management.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/18/11340/pdf?version=1663074035

Huiru Chen

Papers

Green fresh product cost sharing contracts considering freshness-keeping effort

Effects of risk attitudes and investment spillover on supplier encroachment

Effect of risk attitude on outsourcing leadership preferences with demand uncertainty

Assessment of slope stability under uncertain circumstances

How Corporate Social Responsibility Affects Firm Performance: The Inverted-U Shape Contingent on Founder CEO