Abstract
Recently, consumers have been increasingly shopping due to the development of e-commerce; thus, many traditional firms producing green products are entering e-commerce platforms to sell products for their survival. In the contexts of online sales and carbon tax policy, firms need to determine an optimal carbon reduction level and online return strategies. To address firms’ decision-making challenges, we consider a firm producing and selling its green products via an e-commerce platform. For optimal online return strategies, we find that if the residual value of the returned product is relatively small, the firm should not offer an online return service; otherwise, the firm should offer this service. Moreover, the results show that carbon tax policy is detrimental to the firm and consumers, while increasing the average customer satisfaction rate of the product benefits the firm and consumers. Interestingly, we find that the platform should reduce its referral fee as the unit carbon tax increases.
Highlights
In recent years, environmental pollution has attracted increasing attention from governments, firms and consumers
Some e-commerce giants such as Amazon.com and Tmall.com dominate the e-commerce market, and some firms, as third-party sellers, sell their products on e-commerce platforms [6,7]
The impacts of carbon tax policy and online return policy on carbon reduction level have not been studied before, and these have been considered in our paper
Summary
Environmental pollution has attracted increasing attention from governments, firms and consumers. Considering the case of a carbon tax policy and the fact that consumers are increasingly shopping online, firms producing green products and selling products via e-commerce platforms need to determine an optimal product price and product carbon reduction levels, and e-commerce platforms need to decide an optimal referral fee for firms per unit product sold. The paper investigates the optimal product retail price, carbon reduction level, referral fee, the firm’s profit and consumer surplus under the models NR and YR, respectively, and explores the optimal online return strategy for the firm.
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