PONE-D-24-05811Information Sharing And Channel Encroachment In Biomass Supply ChainsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Xu,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Fuli Zhou

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

The abstract section should be revised, and the research gap should be also addressed in the first section.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This paper investigates the interactions between the information sharing strategy and channel encroachment in the straw power supply chain. I Think this paper is interesting, but several problems still need to be addressed. The detailed comments are as follows:

(1) The first part introduces the background and motivation of the research, and the general idea is good. It would be more helpful to offer more examples, especially information sharing.

(2) The second part reviews the literature of the three related fields. Authors are also advised to increase literature citations about PLOS ONE journal. It is suggested to list the relevant literature and contributions as well as the innovation of this paper in the form of table.

(3) In Section 3, I recommend adding the descriptions to explain why this decision sequence for the game is adopted.

(4) There are some areas of expression that need to be improved. For example, in the first line of the second paragraph of part 3, I don't understand what function is the 'existing function' here? Where does it come from? Why is it used? What's the difference between this pre-existing function in the original literature and in my current paper?

(5) The paper should explain more about the mechanism behind the conclusions. Specifically, the theoretical analysis is simple and insufficient, and the reason behind some key results is not clear. For example, Corollaries 4 shows that sharing information of biomass power plants will lead to vertical competition of raw material supply channels. I would like to see a more specific description after the 'vertical competition', for example, the price war caused by vertical competition leads to the reduction of profits of biomass power plants? Other analyses have the same problem.

(6) I also recommend adding several management insights in Sections 4 and 5.

Reviewer #2: The overall logic of this paper is clear, and the game theory model is used to explore the optimal information sharing strategy for farmers to choose whether to occupy the biomass feedstock supply of biomass power plants. Through the detailed analysis of 8 different information sharing scenarios, a more powerful research conclusion is obtained.In addition, the structure of the paper is reasonable, and the selected research questions are interesting.For example, the research on the sustainable development of the biomass raw material supply chain is a very important research hotspot in China's current development and has strong research necessity. This paper chooses a good research entry point. Personally, I think it is a good research paper. However, there are still some shortcomings that need to be further improved to better meet the standards of public publication.

1.Please adjust the expression of the first sentence of the second paragraph of the introduction. The second paragraph mainly expresses the view that "biomass power generation still has considerable space for development", which has no transitional relationship with the previous paragraph, it is not recommended to use "HOWEVER..." Sentence patterns to express ideas.

2.It is suggested to add "theoretical contributions" to the "6 Conclusions" section. This part should respond to the research gap proposed above through literature dialogue, in order to highlight the theoretical contribution of this research.

3.This research question has strong application orientation, and it is suggested to further enrich the content of "Managerial implications". Specific improvement measures can be proposed from the perspective of different relevant subjects, such as how the government should use the conclusions of this study to improve relevant work and so on.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-24-05811R1Information Sharing And Channel Encroachment In Biomass Supply ChainsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Xu,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 04 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Tengfei Nie

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments:

The authors need to make some further minor revisions.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The author carefully revised the paper and responded to the opinions of the reviewers.

Meanwhile, the format of the paper also meets the requirements of the journal.

From these aspects, it can be seen that the author takes this paper very seriously.

I suggest that this paper can be accepted.

Reviewer #3: Dear authors,

I now finished reading the manuscript of “Information Sharing And Channel Encroachment In Biomass Supply Chains”. This research the interactions between the information sharing strategy and channel encroachment in the straw power supply chain. I Think this paper is interesting, but several problems still need to be addressed.

1. In section3, there are two cases of whether farmers invade or not in d1, which should be further distinguished by using corner label. In addition, it is suggested that the decision sequence can be drawn in the form of a chart and then attached to explain, which is easy for readers to read and understand.

2. Table3 and 4 summarize the pricing conclusions in all cases, I suggest that the position should be adjusted, not in the case of 4.1Scenario NN.

3. The numerical analysis in Section 5. Will the change of the numerical value affect the conclusion? What are the values based on?

4. The analysis of proposition should also add the connection with reality, and put forward the corresponding management implications combined with the conclusion.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Information Sharing And Channel Encroachment In Biomass Supply Chains

PONE-D-24-05811R2

Dear Dr. Xu,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Tengfei Nie

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: