Abstract
More low-carbon products help fight climate change and environmental problems. Governments consider encouraging the manufacturer’s initiative of producing low-carbon products by providing subsidies. However, when the manufacturer sells low-carbon products through the e-commerce platform, fairness concerns arise because of the profit difference. So, this paper builds game models to study decision behavior in the low-carbon e-commerce supply chain when the manufacturer receives government carbon subsidies and has fairness concerns. Our findings show that consumers’ preference for low-carbon products will be conducive to the operation of the supply chain. So it is necessary to popularize low-carbon products. The effect of government subsidies on supply chain decisions is different from fairness concerns. Government subsidies are positive factors in the supply chain operation, which can stimulate the manufacturer to make low-carbon products as expected and choose the high quality-high price development mode. This will help improve the profit of enterprises in the supply chain but cannot effectively stimulate the e-commerce platform to increase its service level. By contrast, the manufacturer’s fairness concerns are negative factors, which make the manufacturer prefer to adopt a low quality-low price development mode to improve their utility. This offsets the positive effect of government subsidies. It turns out that the profit of both node enterprises and the supply chain system has declined. But, fairness concerns are an important way to express the manufacturer’s demand. Finally, the joint allocation contract of cost and profit designed by comprehensively considering the effect of government subsidies and fairness concerns can make the supply chain coordinated. However, even as positive factors, only within a specific range do government subsidies help coordinate the supply chain, but not the more, the better.
Highlights
With the environmental problems being more and more concerned, low-carbon products that can save energy and reduce carbon emission have gradually become consumption trends, for example, energy-saving light, inverter, and air conditioner
From the perspective that the government actively encourages the manufacturer to produce low-carbon products by providing carbon subsidies, this paper introduces carbon emission reduction costs and carbon subsidies into the manufacturer’s profit function
According to Yao and Liu [50], the demanded quantity of low-carbon product depends on its sales price, the manufacturer’s carbon emission reduction level, and the platform’s service level, which can be formulated as q D − d1p + d2s + d3h
Summary
With the environmental problems being more and more concerned, low-carbon products that can save energy and reduce carbon emission have gradually become consumption trends, for example, energy-saving light, inverter, and air conditioner. Fair concerns exist in different backgrounds, but most of them studied that between the retailers and manufacturers in the supply chain of ordinary products [24, 27, 29, 31]; even though there are researches related to online or low-carbon background, they do not consider them together [23, 30]. Ird, various coordination contracts have been designed aiming to reduce the carbon emission or protect the environment [32, 36], and some of them have taken government role [41], low-carbon preference [42], or fairness concern [44] into account, but no works addressed the problem with all of them; under the e-commerce background, Wang et al [48] coordinated the supply chain when the manufacturer has fairness concerns, but no carbon subsidy is considered. In this paper, our contributions are to formulate the game model for low-carbon e-commerce supply chain with government carbon subsidies and fairness concerns, exploring the effect of government carbon subsidies and fairness concerns on the supply chain, determining what the manufacturer and the platform will react, achieving the coordination of the supply chain by allocating the carbon subsidies, commission, and the cost as a whole
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