A Study On Firms' Operational Decisions In Supply Chains Under Carbon Cap Policies

The economic development model driven by fossil energy has caused a series of climate change problems,seriously affecting the survival and development of human beings.In order to reduce the negative impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on human survival and development,more and more countries and regions have issued a series of policies and regulations to control and even reduce carbon emissions.While promoting low-carbon development,the government's task of controlling and reducing carbon emissions will inevitably be implemented at the enterprise level in the supply chains,which will have a series of impacts on business decision-making.Among various carbon emission reduction policies,this paper focuses on two representative carbon cap related policies,which are supplemented by two typical complex supply chain network models to study the impacts of the carbon policies on supply chain performances and enterprise operational decision-making.First,we consider a three-tier supply chain supernetwork model constrained by mandatory carbon cap policy.In the network,many manufacturers produce homogeneous products and sell them to many terminal markets through many retailers.Besides,manufacturers can choose decentralized or centralized decision-making,and under the relatively loose carbon cap policy,they can choose whether to share the carbon caps or not.Therefore,the combination of decision-making modes and carbon cap using modes constitutes four basic scenarios.The effects of carbon caps on manufacturer's profits and carbon emissions under four scenarios are studied by numerical examples.The results show that using moderate level of carbon cap can be balance corporate profits and carbon emission reduction objectives,and the Pareto improvement of supply chain performance can be achieved by considering the carbon emission efficiency,decision-making models and the size of carbon cap.Then we study an assembly supply chain model under carbon cap and trade policy.Each manufacturer in the model needs to meet the relevant demand from the internal supply chain and the independent stochastic demand from the external supply chain.They also need to balance manufacturing and selling products by consuming carbon caps against selling carbon caps directly.Using the variational inequality theory to solve the model and give a numerical example,we find that the carbon trading price in some given intervals can effectively reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing the profits of the enterprise,but reducing the carbon cap of a manufacturer will reduce the carbon emissions and profits of all manufacturers.The above research results can enrich the theory of sustainable operation and supply chain management to a certain extent,and provide valuable suggestions for carbon emission reduction policy makers,enterprises and supply chain operational decision-making.