Consumers are increasingly conscious of the ethical and environmental impacts of production and seek out firms with sustainable supply chains. We simultaneously examine efforts to combat child labor while encouraging environmentally sound practices in cocoa production. Underscoring the multidimensional nature of sustainability, we introduce a dual-stage supply chain framework featuring a producer and buyer. Importantly, we recognize that a producer may not disclose to the buyer their use of child labor in place of higher-cost legitimate labor to increase profit. No framework exists for evaluating both environmental and social sustainability dimensions for all agents in a supply chain against such a background of asymmetric information. This study is motivated by the design of incentive-compatible contracts to ascertain transparency and fair practices in cocoa production. Thus, we introduce a game-theoretic model to evaluate optimal strategies under symmetric and asymmetric information scenarios.
Amir Jamali is a Ph.D. student in Business Administration and Management at WPI, with a master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Tehran and a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology. His research focuses on human and wildlife trafficking, as well as other areas such as supply chain resilience, contract theory, game theory, humanitarian logistics, mathematical modeling and optimization. Amir has published his research in journals such as Annals of Operations Research and Omega. His research aims to address complex problems faced by organizations and society through an interdisciplinary and quantitative approach.
Contact: Ajamali@wpi.edu