Evolutionary Game Analysis Among Three Green-Sensitive Parties in Green Supply Chains

Abstract

A green supply chain, as one of the most critical low-carbon strategies, has been widely studied along with evolutionary game theory, for which governmental policies, such as a carbon tax, subsidies, or penalties, have been frequently applied; however, green sensitivity has been little explored. In this study, a general evolutionary game model composed of green-sensitive governments, enterprises, and consumers is built by considering the policy factors, and the evolutionary stable strategies of this model are solved. The solution results reveal that the green sensitivities significantly affect the evolutionary dynamics and stable strategies of the model. Green supply chains can evolve from low to advanced stages as the green sensitivities increase. At low development stages, governments must take the lead in enhancing their green sensitivity, resort to two key composite policy factor solutions, and encourage enterprises and consumers to increase their green sensitivities and drive them to adopt green strategies. As the green sensitivities of both enterprises and consumers have progressively increased to a certain high level, governments can adopt a nonsupervision strategy, reaching an advanced evolutionary stable strategy with the enterprises and consumers having complete autonomy. Therefore, green sensitivity has been proven to be a substitute for policy factors for green supply chain development. Moreover, the advanced strategy cannot be reached by any policy factor composition without green sensitivity. The findings above clarify the significance of green sensitivity, indicating that specific government policies based on the specific green sensitivities of the three parties can improve green supply chain management.