Vaccine supply chain decision and coordination with manufacturers competition under blockchain technology

Abstract

With vaccine incidents occur frequently and the wide application of blockchain technology, the construction of blockchain-based vaccine supply chain (VSC) has become a feasible solution to effectively solve vaccine safety problems. However, there is a lack of research on the operation decision of blockchain-based VSC. Based on this, combined with the current situation of vaccine manufacturers competition in the vaccine market, we build a game model of blockchain-based VSC and explore its optimal decision and coordination strategies. The results show that the higher the vaccine substitutability, the higher the profit of each member. When the production cost ratio of the two vaccine manufacturers is low, they will be more willing to join the blockchain system. When the proportion of problematic vaccines is low, it is more beneficial for the VSC to adopt blockchain technology. The cost-sharing contract can neither effectively coordinate the blockchain-based VSC nor realize its Pareto optimality. The blockchain-based VSC coordination can be achieved by two vaccine manufacturers signing revenue-sharing contracts or two-part tariff contracts with the vaccination unit respectively.