Sustainability Strategies of Equipment Introduction and Overcapacity Risk Sharing in Mask Emergency Supply Chains during Pandemics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Author(s), 

Thank you for your analysis. Below are some constructive suggestions to strengthen your paper. 

Title, abstract, and keywords

All relevant. However, I suggest adding the word "Sustainability" also within the title. 

Introduction

This section should also include background about COVID-19 to legitimate the topic. You may consider: 

• 10.5539/ijbm.v15n7p48
• https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169296
• 10.5539/ijbm.v16n1p35
• http://www.cscjournals.org/library/manuscriptinfo.php?mc=IJBRM-294
• and others. 

Finally, this section should also contain in the end a map of the paper. 

Methodology 

A clear and precise section about the method employed should be put in the article. Here, I can denote questionnaire parts. It is a methodology part. However, you should also declare the nature of the paper quantitative (or mixed) citing relevant literature in this sense. 

Results

Also, a results section should be clearly identified. Now, it is present (I understand after the questionnaire part). But, this section should be put only considering the real results obtained in your research paper. 

Discussion

This section is interesting and well-written. However, I would suggest to real discuss adding references and identifying what your study adds to the previous literature mentioned in the introduction section. 

Conclusion

I would avoid the conclusion division by "First", "Second". Please, implement a narrative section also with points but with a little introduction for all the concepts under investigation. 

All the best

The Reviewer

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewer:

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Sustainability Strategies of Equipment Introduction and Overcapacity Risk Sharing in Mask Emergency Supply Chains during Pandemics” (ID: sustainability-1363105). These comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, and provide crucial guidance for our research. We have studied the comments carefully and have made corrections that we hope will meet with your approval. The main corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewers’ comments are as follows:

Comment 1:

Title, abstract, and keywords

All relevant. However, I suggest adding the word "Sustainability" also within the title. 

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. We have added "Sustainability" to the title. The new title is “Sustainability Strategies of Equipment Introduction and Overcapacity Risk Sharing in Mask Emergency Supply Chains during Pandemics.”

 

Comment 2:

Introduction

This section should also include the background of COVID-19 to legitimize the topic. You may consider: 

• 5539/ijbm.v15n7p48
• https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169296
• 5539/ijbm.v16n1p35
• http://www.cscjournals.org/library/manuscriptinfo.php?mc=IJBRM-294
• and others. 

Finally, this section also contains a map of the paper. 

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. We have carefully read the papers you recommended and added their content to our literature review. Several papers have been added to our reference literature, which greatly enriches the references of our papers. literature. In addition, based on your opinion, we have added a map of the paper to the corresponding position of the paper. Please see the red part in the paragraph1、7 and 11 of section 1.

Comment 3:

Methodology

A clear and precise section of the method employed should be included in the article. Here, I denote the questionnaire’s parts. This is a part of the methodology. However, you should also declare the nature of the paper quantitative (or mixed) citing relevant literature in this sense. 

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Based on your comments, we have added a paragraph to describe the research methods of this paper. Please see the red part in the paragraph 10 of section 1.

Comment 4:

Results

In addition, the results section should be clearly identified. Now, it is present (I understand it after the questionnaire). However, this section should consider only the real results obtained in your research paper.

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Based on your opinion, we have added a description of the results of the research methods (including questionnaires, game models, and cusp catastrophe models) in the paper to ensure that the research results are clearer. Please see the red part in sections 2 and 3.

Comment 5:

Discussion

This section is interesting and well-written. However, I would suggest to real discuss adding references and identifying what your study adds to the literature mentioned in the introduction section.

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Based on your comments, we have added a paragraph to the discussion section to introduce our contributions on the basis of existing research. Please see the red part in the paragraph1 of section 4.

Comment 6:

Conclusion

I would avoid the conclusion division by "First,” "Second" Please implement a narrative section with points but with a little introduction for all the concepts under investigation.

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. As per your opinion, we deleted the first and second serial numbers in the conclusion section, and merged the content into a more standard narrative, highlighting the contribution of this study. Please see the red part in the paragraph 1 of section 5.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

An overall interesting paper that addresses the sustainability of mask emergency supply chain building on the strategic choices of financial leasing.

Questionnaire:

The results of the field survey can be improved regarding the level of understanding of financial leasing (lines 187-190). For example, it’s worth mentioning if their responses are statistically significant below the mid-point of the 5-point Likert type scale (t-test).

Conclusions:

This study incorporates financial leasing institutions, the mask emergency production manufacturers and the government in order to reduce the scale of mask production after the occurrence of overcapacity in the post-pandemic period, through a game model. The output of the paper is the emergence of a Tripartite Game Model including financial leasing institutions, mask manufacturers, and the government. Thus, the financial leasing institutions are the lessors, the mask manufacturers are the lessees, and the government is the guarantor.

However, the mask emergency industry and the relevant integrated supply chain as an ecosystem should be taken into consideration in order to address the issues of overcapacity and unsalability of masks. Thus, several operations should be shared by this ecosystem in order to address these problems (e.g. masks production planning, storage, distribution channels (network in diverse countries), information sharing, market research, customer behaviour, public health policy, logistics, raw materials supply).

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewer:

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Sustainability Strategies of Equipment Introduction and Overcapacity Risk Sharing in Mask Emergency Supply Chains during Pandemics” (ID: sustainability-1363105). These comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, and provide crucial guidance for our research. We have studied the comments carefully and have made corrections that we hope will meet with your approval. The main corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewers’ comments are as follows:

Comment 1:

Questionnaire:

The results of the field survey can be improved regarding the level of understanding of financial leasing (lines 187-190). For example, it is worth mentioning that their responses are statistically significant below the midpoint of the 5-point Likert-type scale (t-test).

Response:

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. According to your opinion, in order to check whether the data in this study’s questionnaire is valid, the t-test is performed on the data of the four answers involving the degree of understanding of financial leasing by practitioners in the field of masks. The result of the t-test is significant. Please see the red part in the section 2.2.

Comment 2:

Conclusions:

This study incorporates financial leasing institutions, mask emergency production manufacturers, and the government to reduce the scale of mask production after the occurrence of overcapacity in the post-pandemic period, through a game model. The output of this paper is the emergence of a  tripartite game model   that includes financial leasing institutions, mask manufacturers, and the government. Thus, the financial leasing institutions are the lessors, the mask manufacturers are the lessees, and the government is the guarantor.

However, the mask emergency industry and the relevant integrated supply chain as an ecosystem should be considered to address the issues of overcapacity and unsalability of masks. Thus, several operations should be shared by this ecosystem in order to address these problems (e.g., masks production planning, storage, distribution channels (network in diverse countries), information sharing, market research, customer behavior, public health policy, logistics, and raw material supply).

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. Section 5 of this paper has been modified accordingly (please see the red part in the second paragraph of section 5). As a complete ecosystem, the mask emergency supply chain includes the production plan, storage, distribution channels, information sharing, market research, customer behavior, logistics, public health policy, and raw material supply of the mask emergency supply chain. The authors have created a paper on the material pre-storage and information sharing of the mask emergency supply chain.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 3 Report

The research focuses on an extremely interesting topic. Currently, the instability of the general economic situation is growing, which is associated with the cyclical nature of the capitalist economy and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences. In this regard, the development of mathematical models of the economic agents’ behavior in the turbulent economic conditions and the search for optimization decisions tools in a situation of overproduction is an important scientific and practical problem. The advantages of the study are an attempt to find a mathematically formalized approach to solving the problem of masks overproduction, as well as the possibility of scaling the developed models and their adaptation for use in other product categories. The disadvantages are the lack of a description of the procedure for selecting respondents for the survey in the section 2.2, incorrect presentation of formulas on the page 8, lack of explanations on the process of formulas converting, as well as incorrect numbering of figures in the text.

Author Response

Dear Editor and Reviewer:

Thank you for your letter and for the reviewers’ comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Sustainability Strategies of Equipment Introduction and Overcapacity Risk Sharing in Mask Emergency Supply Chains during Pandemics” (ID: sustainability-1363105). These comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper, and provide crucial guidance for our research. We have studied the comments carefully and have made corrections that we hope will meet with your approval. The main corrections in the paper and the responses to the reviewers’ comments are as follows:

This study focuses on an extremely interesting topic. Currently, the instability of the general economic situation is growing, which is associated with the cyclical nature of the capitalist economy and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences. In this regard, the development of mathematical models of the economic agents’ behavior in turbulent economic conditions and the search for optimization decision tools in a situation of overproduction is an important scientific and practical problem. The advantages of this study are an attempt to find a mathematically formalized approach to solving the problem of mask overproduction, as well as the possibility of scaling the developed models and their adaptation for use in other product categories. The disadvantages are the lack of a description of the procedure for selecting respondents for the survey in Section 2.2, incorrect presentation of formulas on page 8, lack of explanations on the process of converting formulas, and incorrect numbering of figures in the text.

Comment 1:

The disadvantages are the lack of a description of the procedure for selecting respondents for the survey in Section 2.2.

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions, the first author of this paper was a manager of a large financial leasing institution in mainland China, and he sent online questionnaires to financial leasing practitioners in China through five financial leasing internal WeChat groups. We have further described the source of the questionnaire data in this paper. Please see the red part of the paragraph1 of Section 2.2.

Comment 2:

 incorrect presentation of formulas on page 8, lack of explanations on the process of converting formulas.

Response:

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. The mathematical derivation process and logic that used in section 2.4 "Cusp Catastrophe Model" of this paper are derived from the paper created by the co-supervisor of the corresponding author of this paper (JIANG Feng-zhen, HU Bin. Employee and organization aggressive behavior evolution of catastrophe and control [J]. Soft Science,2018,32(08):134-139.). The derivation process and logic of the mathematical formula in Section 2.4 are as follows:

The replication dynamic equation of the two-party game model is known as K(s)=s(1-s){s[λV（1+E）-λV（1+r）^t-D₁]+(1-s)[λV（1+E）-λV（1+r）^t]-s[λV（1+E）-λV（1+r）ⁿ-λV（1+E）]-(1-s)[λV（1+E）+D₂-λV（1+r）^t-δV]}={- λV[（1+r）ⁿ-（1+r）^t] +D₁-D₂+δV}s³+{λV[（1+r）ⁿ-（1+r）^t] -D₁+2D₂ -2δV}s²+(δV- D₂)s

Let N₁=- λV[（1+r）ⁿ-（1+r）^t] +D₁-D₂+δV，N₂=λV[（1+r）ⁿ-（1+r）^t] -D¹+2D² -2δV，N₃=δV- D₂，

then K(x)== N₁ x³+ N₂ x²+ N₃ x.

Let y=x+ , the purpose is to make a topological homeomorphism mapping, eliminate the x² term, and transform it into an equation for the cusp catastrophe model.

Then = y³(t)+uy(t)+v,  “u” and “v “are both constant terms, which are composed of parameters in the two-party game model.

 

Comment 3:

as well as incorrect numbering of figures in the text.

Response:

Thank you for your comments and suggestions. The incorrect numbering in the paper has been revised .Please see the red part of the paragraph3 of section 2.2.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Author(s), 

Thank you for addressing all my previous suggestions. You made a great work in implementing them. Therefore, I am glad to suggest to the editorial office the acceptance of your research study.

Regards

The Reviewer