A Study on the Relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and Supply Chain Profit Distribution in the Context of Common Prosperity

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

After a careful review, I have serious concerns about this paper, especially regarding research contributions. I give the authors a chance of responding the following major comments. Then, according to their responses, I will be able to decide that their study has to be rejected or can be accepted. Below, I list my major comments on the manuscript.

- What are the main contributions of your work specifically? What aspects of your paper make it distinct from the existing papers in this field? A detailed comparison of your work with Liu et al. (2020) should be provided as the contributions seem to have a lot in common.

* Liu, Y., Xu, Q., & Liu, Z. Y. (2020). A coordination mechanism through value‐added profit distribution in a supply chain considering corporate social responsibility. Managerial and Decision Economics, 41(4), 586-598.

- The introduction section should be improved by highlighting “the importance of this problem”, “fluent explanation of what is addressing in this problem”, and “providing a clear set of practical examples”. Moreover, the introduction section lacks proper reference for the statements which are described.

- Research questions and motivation for the study are missing in the Introductions section.

- The contributions of this study are not clear. In the literature review, the related papers are listed; however, they are reviewed without any gap identification. The authors should shed light on the research gaps and contributions. In the literature review section, the authors should clearly explain how this paper is similar to the related literature and more importantly highlight the main differences from the previous studies. Furthermore, at the end of the literature review section, the research gaps and contributions should be explained.

- The authors should clarify the recycling process. Is the collected product used as raw material to produce the new product?

- It is needed to clearly explain how customer satisfaction with CSR fulfillment (i.e., ) is formulated. Can the authors provide any references for such a function?

- To obtain the optimal decision variables, the concavity of the supplier’s, manufacturer’s, and retailer’s profit functions should be calculated. However, in this study, it is not clear how the authors prove the concavity of the profit functions.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Supply chain collaboration and meeting CSR requirements is an important and actual scientific and economic issue. My suggestions and comments on the manuscript:

·       It was not clearly written if the results of the study apply only to China.

·       Is it necessary to refer to the Common prosperity idea? Without it, the article would be more universal. Placing the research in a political context diminishes its value.

·       The hypotheses in lines 182-193 are in fact assumptions. The manuscript lacks a main objective and/or research questions. Research questions should be posed in the Introduction section and addressed in the Conclusion. The article will then be better organized.

·       The literature review focuses too much on the distant history of CSR and not enough on current research. The research gap and novelty of the studies conducted in the manuscript in relation to those known from the literature were not demonstrated. Shapley value is not a new concept, so what is the novelty of the manuscript?

·       "Level of CSR fulfillment" is vaguely presented. Is it calculated relative to the company's own assumptions or to the industry average?

·       It is not clear enough which patterns and models are taken from the literature and which were created by the authors of the manuscript.

 

·       Validation of the model should be carried out using a specific supply chain as an example. Otherwise, these are only theoretical considerations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript has been significantly improved. I recommend the publication of the manuscript in its present form.