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This paper considers a supply chain in which an upstream supplier sells a component to a downstream manufacturer facing a price and quality sensitive demand. The supplier has a chance to make investment in the manufacturer, which can not only enable the supplier to hold equity shares in the manufacturer and thus achieve profit sharing with the manufacturer, but also provide resources for the manufacturer to improve its product quality. Under any given investment strategy of the supplier, the equilibrium decisions of the two chain members on wholesale price and profit margin are characterized. Then, the supplier's optimal investment strategy is derived. The paper considers three competition models: supplier Stackelberg (SS), manufacturer Stackelberg (MS), and vertical Nash (VN) models, which correspond to different market power structures. The paper shows that the investment can always increase the market demand. Moreover, in both the SS and VN models, the value of the supplier's investment for the entire supply chain, comes from not only the quality improvement but also the profit sharing caused by equity holding; while in the MS model, the investment value comes only from the quality improvement.

This paper considers a multinational green supply chain (MGSC), composed of a manufacturer and a foreign retailer affected by import tariff. The main theme of this paper is to explore supply chain decisions and coordination contract. Four decision models were investigated: (1) the centralized decision supply chain model (model CS), (2) the decentralized decision supply chain model (model DS), (3) the R&D cost sharing contract model (model RD) with the retailer sharing a portion of green R&D cost, and (4) the quantity discount-cost sharing contract model (model QD), which combined a quantity discount contract with a cost sharing contract. The equilibrium decisions of these models were derived. The R&D cost sharing contract was found to improve greenness and performance of the supply chain but cannot reach the optimal performance compared to the centralized decision model. While the quantity discount-cost sharing contract can achieve a perfect coordination of MGSC. Furthermore, import tariff has an adverse effect on the performance of MGSC. The increase in tariff shrinks the threshold of the highest wholesale price and quantity discount coefficient offered by the manufacturer, which will hamper the cooperation of supply chain. However, the enhancement of consumers’ green preference is conducive to encourage the retailer to participate in cooperation and smoothen the adverse effects of tariff fluctuation. In the same model, the adverse effect of tariff on product greenness and the retail price does not change with the increase in its value. However, the adverse effect on the green performance price ratio and the profits from all parties in the supply chain are slow.