A decision framework for incorporating the coordination and behavioural issues in sustainable supply chains in digital economy

Abstract

Global warming climate change and social problems are the worst human-induced sustainability issues that economies across the globe have witnessed. Water pollution greenhouse effect poor working conditions child labour and lack of coordination among channel partners have caused the considerable interruptions in the supply chain network. The purpose of the paper is to identify critical factors affecting behavioural and sustainable supply chain coordination and evaluate strategies for risk reduction in the supply chain coordination in the context of digitization. This study purposes a novel supply chain coordination framework which consists of four themes such as system actor objective and action on which the success or the failure of supply chain can be contingent. Our study integrates multi-criteria decision approach using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (Fuzzy-AHP) and Fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (Fuzzy-DEMATEL) to investigate factors that affected the behavioural and sustainable supply chain coordination in the context of digitization. The Fuzzy-AHP method qualified to hierarchically rank the factors based on the relative fuzzy weightage while Fuzzy-DEMATEL established the inter-relationships among the factors and classified them into cause and effect groups. The findings of our study identified the Environmental performance and decarbonization as the most significant factor and the speed to market as the least important factor in developing behavioural and sustainable supply chain coordination in the context of digitization. Our analysis from Fuzzy AHP-DEMATEL approach reveal that the social preferences (power balance reciprocity fairness) is a significant causal factor which can effectively abolish the issues plaguing behavioural and sustainable supply chain coordination in the context of digitization. The results from our study aim to facilitate decision makers in cultivating a sustainable supply chain framework that can boost trust among the channel partners environmental performance social performance and channel efficiency of the supply chain thereby ensuring sustainability and socio welfare of all the supply chain.