Research on Logistics Service Supply Chain Coordination in the Context of Green Innovation

With the global advancement of sustainable development concepts, the logistics industry is confronting significant environmental challenges, making green innovation a critical driver for industrial transformation and upgrading. However, during the green innovation process in logistics service supply chains, the differing roles of logistics service integrators and logistics service providers, combined with high costs and uncertain returns, hinder coordination efficiency. Therefore, it is imperative to enhance the coordination of supply chain contracts. Nevertheless, existing literature provides limited insights into the coordination capacities and impacts of different contracts on green innovation in logistics service supply chains. This study develops a Stackelberg game model where the logistics service integrator acts as the leader and logistics service providers serve as followers, examining the effects of cost-sharing contracts, revenue-sharing contracts, and hybrid cost-sharing and revenue-sharing contracts on supply chain coordination. Numerical simulations are employed to validate the findings. The results indicate that hybrid contracts provide the strongest incentives for green innovation among supply chain participants, whereas cost-sharing contracts offer relatively weaker incentives for integrators’ green design innovation. In addition, revenue-sharing contracts and hybrid contracts were effective in reducing the wholesale price of green logistics services, although all three contract types resulted in higher market prices. Finally, all three contract types achieve Pareto improvements in the supply chain, with hybrid contracts maximizing the total profit of the supply chain. This study not only elucidates the incentive mechanisms and relative advantages of different contracts in supply chain collaboration, but also offers critical theoretical and practical insights for designing contracts to foster green innovation in the logistics sector.