The mainstream strategy in the coordination of agri-food chains has traditionally focused more on the enhancement of chain performance by adopting lean and highly integrated strategies. These strategies are premised on the principle that governance structures are the result of tactics that economize on transaction costs in exchanges in chains. Due to existing interdependencies between chain players such strategies expose these chains to detrimentally disruptive uncertainty. This paper adopted a heuristic stress-testing approach to measure the fragility of South African egg value chain and performed a comparative fragility analysis of two coordination approaches in the egg chain. Additionally, the analysis of results indicated that the egg chain strategy with high levels of interdependencies between its chain players as significantly fragile. Precisely, the difference between the chain strategies was associated with a variety of differences at the factor and chain player levels that led up to a higher overall chain fragility of the chain with higher levels of interdependency. Inevitably, the paper propositions that there is a trade-off between chain performance and fragility. The results of the study affirmed that there is a trade-off between chain performance and fragility which needs to be balanced.

中文翻译：

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考虑农业食品链协调策略的链性能与脆弱性之间的权衡：一个南非鸡蛋链的案例研究

传统上，农业食品链协调中的主流策略通过采用精益和高度集成的策略，将重点更多地放在了提高链绩效上。这些策略的前提是治理结构是在链交换中节约交易成本的策略的结果。由于链条参与者之间存在相互依存关系，因此此类策略使这些链条面临不利的破坏性不确定性。本文采用启发式压力测试方法来衡量南非鸡蛋价值链的脆弱性，并对鸡蛋链中两种协调方法进行了比较脆弱性分​​析。此外，对结果的分析表明，蛋链策略在其链参与者之间具有高度的相互依赖性，因此非常脆弱。确切地说，链策略之间的差异与因素和链参与者级别上的各种差异相关，从而导致链的整体链脆弱性更高，相互依赖性更高。不可避免地，本文提出了在链条性能和脆弱性之间进行权衡的主张。研究结果确认，在链条性能和脆弱性之间需要权衡取舍。