关键词: 居家养老, 服务供应链, 消费补贴, 质量奖惩

Abstract: With the acceleration of population aging, the home-based care model has become an effective solution to alleviating the pressure of pension. In recent years, the number of all kinds of home-based care service institutions in China has continued to increase. However, many institutions can’t achieve sustainable operation because of the high operating cost and low service level. Due to the lack of ability to pay and uneven service quality, the elderly’s high demand and willingness for home-based care services are inconsistent with their actual purchase behavior. To solve the above problems, the Chinese government has issued several policy documents, but the policy effects are different due to the different implementation objects and methods. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the influence of consumption subsidies and quality rewards and punishments on the decision-making of home-based care service institutions and the elderly.
Firstly, aiming at the home-based care supply chain, this paper constructs a game model in three situations: non-government intervention mechanism, consumption subsidy mechanism, and quality reward and punishment mechanism. Secondly, through backward induction, we get the optimal solution of the market price of home-based care service, the actual purchase price of the elderly, the market demand of home-based care service, the profit of home-based care service institutions, consumer surplus, and social welfare. Then, the optimal solutions of the three decision models are compared and analyzed, and the advantages and disadvantages of different mechanisms are discussed. Finally, in order to illustrate the validity of the model and verify the correctness of the proposition, we use the existing literature for reference to assign values to parameters, and use MATLAB to carry out numerical simulation under different conditions, and analyze the influence of quality improvement cost coefficient, government subsidies and rewards and punishments on the equilibrium results.
The results show that: (1)The consumption subsidy mechanism is superior to the quality reward and punishment mechanism and the non-government intervention mechanism in improving the purchasing power level of economic consumers, but it will also indirectly lead to the quality consumers needing to pay higher prices to obtain services. (2)The incentive effect of quality reward and punishment mechanism on improving service quality and purchasing demand of quality consumers is better than that of consumption subsidy mechanism and non-government intervention mechanism, and the policy benefits more widely. (3)When the quality standard of home-based aged care service or the improvement coefficient of quality cost is too high, it is difficult for home-based aged care service institutions to make up for the cost to their payment by improving the quality, resulting in their profits under the quality reward and punishment mechanism being lower than that those under the non-government intervention mechanism. (4)When the cost coefficient of quality improvement is too high, especially when the proportion of economic consumers is high, the government should choose to implement the consumption subsidy mechanism for the sake of protecting the needs of home-based care services for the elderly with financial difficulties and the interests of service organizations. (5)When the cost coefficient of quality improvement is low, the government should choose to implement the quality reward and punishment mechanism for the sake of promoting the high-quality development of home care services and improving the satisfaction of the elderly. Therefore, the government should flexibly adjust subsidies and rewards, and punishments on the premise of formulating scientific and reasonable quality standards for home care services.
There are still some shortcomings in this paper, such as not considering the influence of government budget constraints, asymmetric demand information, and other factors. The follow-up research can be further explored to provide a more comprehensive theoretical basis and decision support for the government to improve the regulation policy of home-based care services and promote the sustainable and healthy development of the home-based care supply chain.

Key words: home-based care, service supply chain, consumption subsidy, quality reward and punishment