Xiaopei Dai

The widespread use of traditional packaging materials poses significant environmental challenges. Adopting green packaging is essential for reducing pollution and conserving natural resources. This paper aims to examine the effectiveness of government incentives and penalties in promoting the adoption of green packaging by logistics companies. We developed an evolutionary game theory model that involves governments and logistics companies, comparing the impacts of static and dynamic reward and penalty policies. The results indicate that (1) static policies often lead to oscillatory adoption rates of green packaging without achieving a stable equilibrium, while dynamic policies generally promote steadier adoption of sustainable practices. (2) Different combinations of dynamic policies have varying influences on logistics companies’ propensity to adopt green packaging solutions. Specifically, dynamic rewards and static penalties are particularly effective at encouraging logistics companies to adopt green packaging. (3) A combination of dynamic rewards and penalties tends to facilitate more rapid and consistent adoption of green packaging by logistics companies. (4) An increase in government supervision costs is associated with reduced regulatory actions and a lower prevalence of green packaging. These insights are critical for policymakers aiming to craft regulations that successfully encourage sustainability within logistics operations.

Organic agriculture is a sustainable form of farming that can protect the environment. However, the high production costs of organic agriculture deter farmers from switching to organic farming. To support the development of organic agriculture, many governments offer subsidies to farmers or retailers. We develop an evolutionary game model to investigate the effect of government subsidies on organic agriculture and the conditions under which the government should subsidize farmers or retailers. We find that subsidizing farmers or retailers can promote agricultural development. Government subsidies lower the requirement for social responsibility and the premium that retailers offer. Furthermore, if the consumer’s social responsibility is sufficiently low, the government’s best choice is to subsidize retailers. If the social responsibility premium is medium, the government’s best choice is to subsidize farmers. Finally, higher subsidies motivate more farmers to produce organic products when the government subsidizes retailers. Conversely, if the government subsidizes farmers, it is more conducive to reducing the burden on retailers to purchase organic products.

In e-commerce, retailers often use return shipping insurance (RSI) to solve consumer returns, leading to a high return rate. To reduce this negative effect, we consider restricting rights to restrict consumers from obtaining RSI or buying products. We examine the effect of RSI on retail pricing strategies and profits under restricting rights. We formulate a game-theoretical model which consists of one insurer, a retailer and two types of consumers (informed consumers and uninformed consumers). By solving the model, we find that even though the insurer has restricted uninformed consumers from obtaining RSI, the retailer further restricts them from buying the product when the salvage value is low. Second, when the retailer and insurer have no right to restrict uninformed consumers, purchasing RSI may hurt the retailer. Third, when the insurer restricts uninformed consumers and the product salvage is low, the retailer adopts the high-price strategy; otherwise, the retailer adopts the low-price strategy. Finally, when the product salvage is low, the retailer will prevent uninformed consumers from buying the product by adopting the high-price strategy or using the restricting right. In this case, the insurer will set a higher premium.

Green agriculture can minimize the negative impact of agriculture on the environment, and green products are usually sold at a higher price due to their green attributes. This induces farmers to produce conventional products and falsely sell them as green products. To better promote the development of the green agricultural product market, we study the effect of retailers’ audit strategies, premium policies and farmers’ punishment policy on farmers’ decisions. We develop an evolutionary game theory model to describe evolutionary behaviors of farmers and retailers. Then, we analyze the evolutionary stability strategies in different scenarios and numerically simulate the evolution of farmers’ decisions and retailers’ decisions to verify theoretical results. The results show that the static premium policy is not an ideal policy to promote the development of green agriculture, whereas the dynamic premium policy, as well as the dynamic premium and farmers’ punishment policy, could lead to an effective green market. A higher maximum premium encourages more farmers to produce true green products and may allow more retailers not to audit farmers. Moreover, if the punishment for farmers increases, more retailers will not audit farmers, leading to lower audit cost. Finally, a lower audit fee could motivate more farmers to produce true green products.