The article titled “Evolutionary Game Analysis of Chinese Food Quality considering Effort Levels” [1] is similar to another article by the same authors published earlier in Chinese, titled “Evolutionary Game of Quality and Safety Investment of Agricultural Products under Punishment Mechanism” [2]. The authors have compared and analyzed the differences between the two articles, as follows.
The first article [2] was submitted to the Chinese Journal of Management Science in January 2018 and published in August 2019. However, there were still some deficiencies in the research on this issue (see lines 398–402). This article considers the impact of quality and safety input costs on revenue. It is assumed that the product sales volume is unchanged and the improvement of quality leads to the increase in product price, thus obtaining more benefits (lines 162–164, 168–170, and 174–176).
The second article [1], submitted to Complexity, focused on cooperation between suppliers and producers in the food supply chain from an effort-level perspective. The two articles study the problem from different perspectives: the meaning of quality, safety, input cost, and effort level is different, for example. The level of effort affects not only the quality of products but also the quantity of products sold (lines 141–142, 148–149, and 154–156). The level of effort not only involves the quality input cost but also includes promotion and service, such as advertising, promotion, the extension of service time, improvement of the level of service, increasing inventory quantity, and fast reaction, which have a relatively large impact on product sales.
Both articles use the evolutionary game method to study the cooperation between suppliers and producers in the food supply chain. There may be some similarities in the structure of the article. However, compared with the earlier article and previous literature, the second article [1] mainly has the following three contributions:(1)The influence of effort level on the benefits to both parties is from the perspective of effort level, so the meanings of the payment matrix parameters in the two articles are different (lines 162–164)(2)The influence of the initial state on the evolution result is considered, which is an important innovation (lines 332–348)(3)The influence of changes in different parameter values on the result of system evolution is also studied (lines 349–396)
To sum up, the work in [1] is a further study on cooperation in the food supply chain from the perspective of effort level. Compared with the existing research results, the three innovations listed above are original.