Lu Zhang

Facing the carbon tax policy, green technology innovation decisions and product strategy are important for firms. We develop a manufacturer‐retailer Stackelberg game to analyze three strategies: only producing the old‐generation product, only producing updated‐generation products, or both. We have three key findings. Firstly, when only the updated generation is produced, the carbon reduction rate increases first and then decreases along with the carbon tax. That is, an excessively high tax rate compresses the market and suppresses innovation, which serves as a warning to pure‐green enterprises. Secondly, under high tax rates, the dual‐product strategy actually performs better in terms of environmental performance. The internal competition between updated‐generation and old‐generation products drives continuous innovation. Thirdly, there is a conflict in strategic preferences between manufacturers and retailers: Under the low carbon tax rate, the manufacturer prefers old‐generation products, whereas the retailer prefers newer ones, revealing the crucial role of channel coordination in the green transition. From the perspective of social welfare, the dual‐product strategy is optimal when the carbon emission damage is relatively low. When the damage is relatively serious, under a low carbon tax rate, the focus should be on updating products, whereas under a high tax rate, a dual‐product strategy should be adopted to take the lead. These findings guide firms to dynamically adjust their product portfolios based on tax rates, and policymakers need to design differentiated carbon taxes for different industry structures.

Firms offer trade‐in programs that consumers trade an old product and receive trade‐in rebate when buying a new one. To study whether the manufacturer or the retailer should introduce a trade‐in program, we build a Stackelberg game that consists of one manufacturer and one retailer by considering old and new consumers in a retailer‐led supply chain. We find that when the production cost of a product is high under no trade‐in program, old consumers do not purchase the product. When the retailer provides the trade‐in program, there are “lose–win” situation for the manufacturer and retailer. However, when the manufacturer provides the trade‐in program, there are “win–win” situation for the manufacturer and retailer. Then, we find that the manufacturer (retailer) can benefit more from providing trade‐in program by themselves than that provided by the other one.

In the e-commerce market, many e-commerce platforms act as resellers when selling products, and act as agents when selling other products. In the sales process, e-commerce platforms can either build their own blockchain anti-counterfeit traceability platforms or cooperate with third-party blockchain anti-counterfeit traceability platforms. This will generate four scenarios: 1) reseller, building its own platform (RE); 2) reseller, cooperating with a third-party platform (RO); 3) agent, building its own platform (ME); 4) agent, cooperating with a third-party platform (MO). Therefore, this paper constructs a differential game model under four modes to explore the interaction between the choice of sales mode and the choice of anti-counterfeit traceability service strategy. The results show that suppliers’ profits are influenced by various aspects. On the one hand, in small-scale markets, the situation in which suppliers can realize higher profits evolves from ME to RO as the wholesale price increases, and in large-scale markets, suppliers are more profitable in the ME mode. On the other hand, with the increase of market scale and the decrease of unit price of anti-counterfeit traceability service of third-party platform, the situation that suppliers can achieve higher profit evolves from RE to RO and then to RE. For e-commerce platform, self-built platform is a better choice. In the small-scale market, as the market size increases, the cost performance of anti-counterfeit traceability service decreases, and the best choice for e-commerce platform evolves from resale to agency sales, and in the large-scale market, the best choice for e-commerce platform is resale.

This paper integrates a low-carbon tourism supply chain consisting of a low-carbon tourist attraction (LTA) providing a low-carbon service and an online travel agency (OTA) responsible for big data marketing. Consumers may also encounter sudden crisis events that occur in the tourist attraction during their visit, and the occurrence of crisis events can damage the low-carbon goodwill of the tourist attraction to the detriment of the sustainable development of the supply chain. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate how tourism firms can develop dynamic strategies in the pre-crisis environment if they envision the occurrence of a crisis event and how crisis events affect interfirm cooperation. This paper uses stochastic jump processes to portray the dynamic evolution of low-carbon goodwill in the context of crisis events and introduces the methods of the differential game and Bellman’s continuous dynamic programming theory to study the sustainable operations of low-carbon tourism supply chains. Our findings provide important managerial insights for enterprises in the tourism supply chain and suggest that they need to not only become aware of the tourist attraction crisis events, but also, more importantly, they need to adjust their appropriate input strategies based on the degree of anticipation of the crisis.