Abstract

Background: Within the fresh food e-commerce supply chain, government effort-contingent subsidies and logistics partnerships critically impact order pricing, preservation, and profitability. This study aims to investigate how different logistics cooperation modes interact with effort-contingent subsidies to optimize supply chain performance under preservation effort and random demand. Methods: We developed three Stackelberg game models: an independent logistics model, a logistics-supplier cooperation model without subsidies and a logistics-supplier cooperative model with government effort-contingent subsidies. Equilibrium strategies were derived theoretically and analyzed through numerical simulations to examine preservation efforts and pricing. Results: The findings show that logistics cooperation combined with effort-contingent subsidies not only optimizes the decision-making behaviors, but also effectively shares preservation costs and mitigates double marginalization. This synergy incentivizes higher preservation efforts and lowers wholesale prices, ultimately reducing retail prices and expanding market demand. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that excessively optimistic demand forecasts (over-ordering) sharply increase systemic costs, causing a reverse drop in actual demand. Conclusions: Government subsidies are an effective macro-policy tool for alleviating cold-chain costs when integrated with logistics cooperation. To build a sustainable supply chain, e-commerce platforms must adopt prudent ordering strategies, while policymakers should structurally design subsidies to incentivize preservation investments rather than purely subsidizing profits.

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