Digital empowerment in agricultural e-commerce supply chains: contract farming versus customized farming

In this paper, we develop a Stackelberg game model to examine how digital empowerment influences agricultural production under two organizational modes: contract farming, with farmer-led technology adoption, and customized farming, with platform-led adoption. We evaluate the effectiveness of digital technologies and identify the key factors constraining their implementation. The main findings are as follows: (1) The impact of digital empowerment depends on production conditions: when quality improvement is inexpensive, contract farming performs better, whereas in more demanding environments, customized farming yields higher quality and output. (2) Profitability is scale-dependent: farmers with small or medium-scale operations benefit mainly from customized farming, while only large-scale farmers benefit from contract farming. For platforms, digital empowerment always increases profits, with customized farming dominating only when platform-scale effects are strong. (3) When the farmer’s planting scale is large and the platform’s scale effect is strong, digitally empowered customized farming can achieve Pareto improvements for the supply chain. Overall, this study contributes a unified analytical framework that links digitalization intensity, production scale, and supply chain performance in agricultural e-commerce.