Hui Yang

Given that the impact of consumers' environmental awareness and government subsidies on retailer sourcing has not been adequately examined in previous research, our study examines the impact of government subsidies on a retailer's low‐carbon sourcing strategies. We define a parameter that characterizes the efficiency of government subsidies and build a game theoretical model that includes an ordinary supplier, a low‐carbon supplier, and a retailer. The retailer's sourcing strategies include three options: only ordinary products (O), only low‐carbon products (L), and both ordinary and low‐carbon products (D). Our analysis shows the following results: First, when the retailer's environmental awareness exceeds a certain threshold, the retailer sources either low‐carbon products or a combination of ordinary and low‐carbon products. Otherwise, the retailer sources both ordinary and low‐carbon products. Second, when the retailer's environmental awareness is relatively high, the government adopts a nonsubsidy policy regardless of the product's abatement level. However, when the retailer's environmental awareness is relatively low, the government's policy depends on the abatement level of the product: It provides a subsidy if the abatement level is low and no subsidy if the abatement level is high. Third, government subsidies to the retailer are not always an effective means of increasing social welfare. Our results have important implications for the design of effective government subsidy policies.

The evolution of tax exemption policies and consumer preferences for low-carbon products affect firms’ optimal pricing strategy selection in a competitive duopoly market. In our study, we build a two-period pricing model to examine the pricing strategy choices between low-carbon and traditional firms. Low-carbon firms offer consumers greater value, improving their overall experience and satisfaction. Given the evolution of government policies from tax exemption to taxation for low-carbon products, we divide the changes in carbon tax into two periods. Since each firm can choose either the uniform pricing strategy (setting the same price in both periods) or the tiered pricing strategy (setting different prices for two periods), four scenarios may occur. Conventional wisdom suggests that a firm’s pricing increases should result in a reduction in consumer demand. Interestingly, our results show that as traditional firm raises prices, consumer demand for traditional products could increase simultaneously in the second period. In such a case, the low-carbon firm selects the uniform pricing strategy and the traditional firm chooses the tiered pricing strategy. Moreover, as tax exemption policies evolve in duopoly markets, the cancellation of the tax exemption policy may intensify competition between traditional and low-carbon firms under certain conditions. Furthermore, given one firm’s pricing strategy, our results show that the other firm could adopt either a uniform pricing strategy or a tiered pricing strategy, which depends on the low-carbon advantage and tax rate.

This paper examines the interplay between the information strategy of an e‐commerce platform and the selling mode strategy of a manufacturer within a co‐opetitive supply chain, as well as the identification of the optimal supply chain strategy. We develop a supply chain model where a platform outsources production of its private label product to a manufacturer, who also sells its national brand product through the platform. The platform must decide whether to acquire consumer quality preference information at a cost and share it with the manufacturer, while the manufacturer needs to choose between the reselling mode or the agency selling mode for its national brand product. The two driving effects (competition‐intensification effect and mode differentiation effect) are identified. Our findings show that the platform will acquire and share information when the acquisition cost is sufficiently low, leading to the “competition‐intensification effect.” Additionally, the manufacturer prefers the agency selling mode when cost‐quality efficiency is low, and the reselling mode otherwise, driven by the “mode differentiation effect.” In cases where information sharing is absent, the manufacturer is more likely to choose the agency selling mode. Interestingly, when the cost‐quality efficiency of the manufacturer's product is moderate and the information acquisition cost is low, the “competition‐intensification effect” and the “mode differentiation effect” offset each other, resulting in the expansion of the region where the manufacturer chooses the reselling mode due to the platform's information‐sharing strategy. As a result, this enhances a cooperative relationship between the manufacturer and the platform. We also derive the optimal supply chain strategy, providing insights into both the manufacturer's selling mode and the platform's information strategies in online retailing.