No abstract

Carbon emission reduction has become a common hot topic around the world. Although the previous literature has proven that the asymmetric information and fairness concerns would influence the operational strategy for low-carbon supply chain, it hardly touched the asymmetric information of fairness concerns, which contradicted practical observations and experimental evidence. Incorporating the asymmetric information of fairness concerns, this paper investigates a low-carbon supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer with discrete types including selfish S-type and fairness-concerned F-type. The manufacturer can observe and thereby know the behavioral type of the retailer in the scenario of symmetric information, while it cannot in the scenario of asymmetric information. In the approach of game theory, the optimal carbon emission reducing strategy and pricing strategy in the symmetric scenario and asymmetric scenario are achieved successively. By comparing the above two scenarios, the impacts stemming from the asymmetric information of fairness concerns at the individual level and systematic level are analyzed, respectively. A case study is offered before concluding some implications for the supply chain management. The findings include the following: Firstly, the asymmetric information of fairness concerns enhances the carbon emission reduction significantly. Although the fairness concerns alone decrease the carbon emission reduction, the asymmetric information increases with the dominating power. Secondly, the asymmetric information of fairness concerns raises the wholesale price and retail price dramatically. Although the impact of either fairness concerns or asymmetric information randomly changes with the behavioral type and information structure, their interactive impacts are stable and change smoothly. Thirdly, the asymmetric information of fairness concerns promotes a fairer profit distribution, while either fairness concerns or asymmetric information alone hardly changes the overall profit of the low-carbon supply chain.

The agricultural supply chain has to balance the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability. This paper investigates the green agricultural supply chain, consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, who are both altruistic towards consumers. Such consumer-oriented altruism is different from the widely adopted enterprise-oriented altruism, which only measures the altruistic behaviors among supply chain enterprises. In the approach of game theory, the optimal operational decision is obtained, and thereby the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability are described rationally and attained, respectively. The impacts of consumer-oriented altruism on the sustainability of the green agricultural supply chain are analyzed and compared in a systematic way. A case study is carried out before drawing conclusions and managerial implications. The findings can be concluded as follows. Firstly, consumer-oriented altruism changes the operational performance of the green agricultural supply chain by enhancing the green level of agricultural products, cutting down the pricing decisions and marginal profit of each supply chain enterprise. Secondly, consumer-oriented altruism simultaneously facilitates each dimension of sustainability to different extents, and economic sustainability is promoted the most prominently, whereas environmental sustainability is improved the least. Thirdly, the retailer’s consumer-oriented altruism always improves each dimension of sustainability more than the manufacturer’s altruism does, and the advantage in the economic dimension is the most significant, while that in the environmental dimension is the smallest.