With the increasing importance of the platform service supply chain (PSSC) in creating economic value, academic research is paying more and more attention to it. The current literature’s research topics and problems cover broad areas. This review adopts bibliometric analysis and thematic analysis to review the related literature systematically and comprehensively. We divided the literature about PSSC into six groups according to the literature’s research topic and research question. Each literature’s research problem and research method are categorized and summarized. Our review results demonstrate that the supply chain’s members’ operational decisions and the supply chain’s coordination are two main types of research questions. Pricing decisions have received the most attention. In terms of the research method, game models are the most common method used in research to achieve the optimization of the PSSC.

SummaryThis paper studies an agriculture supply chain consisting of a government, a leading firm and a group of farmers. The government encourages farmers to make sustainable technologies' input by providing cost share or flat payment. The firm procures products from multiple farmers and shares a portion of input costs. The optimal sustainable technologies' input, wholesale price and government subsidy are determined, and the impacts of different parameters on the decisions with the endogenous or exogenous subsidy are analysed. The results show that when competition intensifies to a certain threshold, farmers will not invest in sustainable technologies. When the subsidy is endogenous, the firm will obtain less profit if he shares more costs because the optimal subsidy decreases with the cost‐sharing proportion. When the subsidy is exogenous, the farmers' optimal sustainable technologies' input under the government's cost share is higher, and the firm may obtain more profit with cost sharing if the subsidy is relatively high. The government provides a higher subsidy to motivate farmers to adopt sustainable technologies when the pollution is more environmentally damaging. The government's cost share is superior to flat payment because it alleviates the government's financial burden with the same effect on motivating sustainable technologies' input.

In this article, we study the distribution, ordering, and pricing strategies when the supplier has a limited output and the retailer has substitute suppliers in a fresh agricultural product supply chain. The Stackelberg game method is adopted to study the optimal strategy of suppliers and retailers with suppliers as the leader and retailers as the follower. The results show that the wholesale price and selling price of suppliers are related to the price of substitutes and the substitution rate, the wholesale price and online selling price increase when the retailer introduces high-quality substitutes. When substitutes exist, the supplier is willing to distribute more fresh agricultural products to retailers. As the substitution rate increases, suppliers are willing to distribute more quantities. Therefore, retailers should choose more suppliers and fresh agricultural products with a higher substitution rate.