Carbon cap-and-trade mechanism is a government-mandated, market-based scheme to reduce emissions, which has a significant effect on manufacturers' operation decisions. Based on the cap-and-trade mechanism, this paper studies the joint production and emission reduction problem of a manufacturer. The manufacturer faces emissions-sensitive demand impacted by consumers' environmental preferences (CEP). An extended newsvendor model is used to find the optimal production quantity and emissions reduction quantity. We explore the impacts of market price of carbon credits, emission reduction investment coefficient and CEP on the optimal strategies. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the theoretical results and orthogonal experimental design technique was applied to find robust system parameters. It is concluded that among all parameters, emissions cap has the greater impact on the expected profit, which is followed by than the market price of carbon credits. This means that the government plays a major role in economic development. The total carbon emissions are mainly affected by the carbon trading price and the product's sale price, which indicates the carbon trading market and product market play a larger role in controlling environmental benefits. Several valuable managerial insights on helping governments and industries understand how market conditions change and make better long-term decisions are further concluded.Sustainability 2019, 11, 474 2 of 15 trading mechanism. Based on carbon trading mechanisms, governments control carbon emissions by allocating free carbon quotas (called emissions cap) to enterprises [4]. If a manufacturer emits more carbon than the emissions cap, it has to buy quotas to emit extra carbon; if a manufacturer emits less carbon than the emissions cap, it can sell surplus carbon credits to gain extra revenue [5]. In China, seven carbon trading centers placed in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and four other cities have implemented a carbon emissions trading mechanism [6]. By December 2017, these trading centers have completed 0.47 billion tons of carbon credits transaction in total and the turnover was more than 0.014 billion USD. It shows that the carbon trading mechanism could affect manufacturers' profits [3,7,8].In recent decades, people have become more concerned about environmental issues and been willing to buy low-carbon products [9,10]. The AliResearch Institution, which is a non-profit agency in China, estimated that the total number of consumers that prefer low-carbon products increased by 14 times in the past four years and reached 65 million in 2015 [11]. Thus, affected by the consumers' environmental preferences (CEP), many manufacturers such as P&G and HP have motivations to invest in low-carbon technologies to reduce carbon emissions [12]. Then CEP may affect manufacturer's profit and total carbon missions. As decision makers, under the cap-an-trade mechanism, all manufacturers need to re-determine their operational decisions, that is, the optimal production quantity a...