Sharing economy in organic food supply chains: A pathway to sustainable development

Abstract Increasing operational and logistical costs, lower yields, and market barriers adversely impact the competitiveness of organic farmers compared with conventional food producers in developing countries. While agricultural cooperatives have recently gained significant popularity in organic food supply chains (OFSCs), there remains a considerable degree of skepticism regarding their contributions toward sustainable development. The current study investigates the role of the sharing economy (SE) in enabling organic smallholders to overcome their specific set of challenges by sharing resources and aggregating peer-to-peer activities using an SE-based cooperative platform. Using a cooperative game theory (CGT) modelling approach, we jointly address the production-inventory planning and pricing problems of multiple competing OFSCs in two scenarios: the non-cooperative (benchmark) and the SE-based cooperative. We present a novel solution algorithm to solve the formulated mathematical models and to characterize the behavior of key decision-makers. After computing the coalitional synergy achieved with the SE-based mechanism, we implement different CGT models to fairly distribute the generated profit among OFSC coalition members. The results reveal that, if designed and implemented appropriately, the proposed SE-based mechanism is capable of concurrently delivering greater financial gains with higher sustainable development benefits due to its underlying innovative peer-to-peer sharing features.