Game-theoretical analysis for supply chain with consumer preference to low carbon

This paper focuses on the impact of consumers’ preference to low carbon in the emission-concerned supply chain. In an emission-concerned supply chain, the consumers are assumed to prefer to low-carbon products. In an emission sensitive market, emission reduction not only brings the higher production costs but also stimulates the inverse demand function. Therefore, this may be an opportunity for players of the supply chain to coordinate their two objectives: environmental pressure (to reduce carbon emissions for environment protection) and profit-seeking, which intuitively seem to be contradictory. In order to address this research focus, a novel emission-sensitive demand function is adopted, and an emission -sensitive cost function is introduced explicitly to capture the deviation production cost caused by emission reduction. Then the decision-making of each member in the emission-concerned supply chain is investigated. We find that the decision-maker of the supply chain will choose different emission reduction strategies for different cases. An inspiring result shows that the channel profit as well as the emission reduction increase in the consumers’ preference to low-carbon consumption simultaneously in particular cases. Moreover, several emission-concerned contracts are designed to coordinate the channel. Another finding is that the manufacturer’s optimal carbon emissions per unit product keeps the same as the centralised channel, no matter whether the supply chain is coordinated or not. Furthermore, the further discussion reveals that less eco-friendly production than the traditional, if lack of external regulation as well as internal moral self-discipline, might be chosen under some specific conditions.