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The purpose of this paper is to examine how customers’ self-control affects their purchase decisions and to discuss the pricing decisions of the retailer under different forms of contract.

The authors use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model customers’ self-control problems. In this framework, the authors examine how the customers’ self-control affects the optimal pricing decision and the selection of the optimal contract form when there is a supplier and a retailer in the supply chain.

The study’s results show that when wholesale price contract is compared with buyback contract, buyback contract is better when customers’ self-control is weak; when quantity-discount contract is compared with wholesale price contract and buyback contract, although quantity discount can encourage customers to purchase more units of products, but both wholesale price contract and buyback contract can be better than quantity-discount contract in some cases. Additionally, the authors demonstrate that revenue sharing contract can increase the supply chain’s profit. The authors also find that sometimes customers’ preplan will lead to the result that the supplier produces more unhealthy products.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to analyze the decision-making of the retailer by developing an analytical framework combining customer’s self-control and supply chain contract. These results have important implications for the supplier and the retailer that sell vice goods.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social capital on the mental health of older adults in rural China. The authors also examine potential heterogeneous effects and two possible pathways from social capital increase to mental health improvement.

Based on a panel data of China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper employs a fixed effect model to examine the impact of social capital on health. A two-stage instrumental variable approach is adopted to alleviate the issue of endogeneity.

Results demonstrate that social capital has improved the mental health of older adults in rural China significantly. The beneficial effect is stronger for female, people with lower income, aged people and mainly observed in the central and western regions. Social capital affects the mental health of rural older adults through raising the awareness of healthy behavior and lowering the searching cost of health-related information.

Social capital plays a vital role in improving the mental health of older adults in rural China and is necessary for the construction of beautiful countryside in China. The authority should increase the investment in both the hard and soft infrastructure to improve the mental health of rural residents and narrow the inequality in health status.

This study enriches the empirical literature on the relationship between social capital and mental health by providing new evidence from China. Also, we choose the social activities and communications of individuals to construct a standardized index for social capital, which can better capture the social capital at the individual level.