讲座题目：Modeling Operations and Financing in Agricultural Cooperative Supply Chains

讲座人：周泉 博士

主持人：刘彦平 教授

讲座时间：2024年11月18日10：00

讲座地点：南开大学商学院A501-2

讲座摘要：

Agricultural cooperatives (co-ops) provide an important channel for farmers to collectively process and market their products. Enabling farmers to pool resources and gain advantages to access the market, co-ops face many challenges in its operations and financing management. To start with, co-ops can have difficulties collecting sufficient capital when being established, especially given that the co-op equity is typically limited to farmer-members who are usually cash-constrained. In order to pursue value-added processing, many co-ops are changing their financial structures by obtaining additional equity from external investors. This helps co-ops to collect capital, but also brings to the fore the conflicting benefits of farmers and external investors. We leverage our analysis to offer tangible insights that can help a co-op to relieve financial constraints in agriculture. Also, co-ops operate with certain principles that are fundamentally different from those of investor-owned firms (IOFs), but need to interact with IOFs along the supply chain. These lead to different implications on their operational decisions, such as farm-gate price and production quantity.

讲座人简介：

Dr Quan Zhou is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business, University of Wollongong in Australia. She obtained a PhD in Operations and Supply Chain Management from University of Auckland in 2016 for her research in managing medical supplies in national reserves. Prior to joining University of Wollongong, she worked as a lecturer at Massey University and a Research Fellow at University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her research interests are in non-profit operations and agricultural value chains. As a strong proponent of practice-inspired research, Dr Zhou is passionate about combining her research interests with practical needs and has been actively involved in practice-driven, applied research. Her research has been published in leading journals including Production and Operations Management and European Journal of Operational Research.