Low-carbon Supply Chain Operations And Optimization Under Asymmetric Carbon Information

Low-carbon policies have been implemented by governments to reduce carbon emissions in recent years, which bring new challenges to firms’ operation and supply chain management. Under low-carbon policies, how the factors(carbon emission, carbon quota and carbon price) will affect the supply chain decision-making, and what different effects will the different low-carbon policies bring become the focuses of the stakeholders. In addiction, there exists asymmetric carbon information between upstream and downstream enterprises, which could lead to misreporting behavior between firms and lower the efficiency of supply chain. Therefore, the optimal misreporting decision of supply chain participants and the coordination mechanism should be concerned in supply chain management.This paper studies the optimal supply chain decision under different low-carbon policies in symmetric and asymmetric carbon information situations, based on a two-echelon supply chain led by a manufacturer. The firms are divided into low-carbon-emission firms and high-carbon-emission firms in the model, and the low-carbon policies include carbon emission trading, carbon tax and a new policy which combined carbon quota and carbon tax mechanism. Different effects of low-carbon policies on different types of firms are also discussed to provide theory basis for enterprises and government decision-making.Firstly, this paper sets up four models to study the optimal decision in decentralized and centralized supply chain in symmetric information, and analyzes the impacts of carbon price, carbon emission and carbon quota coefficients on the supply chain profits and profit distribution in basic model, carbon trading model, carbon tax model and combined quotas and tax model. Then this paper compares different low-carbon policies from multiple perspectives, and illustrates the different strengths and weaknesses of each low-carbon policies in different situations, and also implies that low-carbon-emission firms could improve their profit more easily through changing the way of coorperation under low-carbon policies.Secondly, this paper discusses the optimal misreporting decision of manufacturer and retailer of different types and the impacts of misreporting on supply chain in the asymmetric information situation under low-carbon policies. The results imply manufacturer and retailer have different misreporting decisions in different low-carbon policies. The retailer could increase his profit through misreporting, and get the same profit as that in no reduction policy under certain conditions, which would lower the efficiency of low-carbon policies. Besides, a higher price sensitivity coefficient of consumer is better to low-carbon-emission supply chain under low-carbon policies.Finally, this paper uses the revenue sharing contract to coordinate the decentralized supply chain under symmetric and asymmetric carbon information based on different low-carbon policies, and gives the value interval of revenue sharing coefficient which could maximize supply chain profits under symmetric carbon information and the best revenue sharing coefficient which could make retailer reflect carbon information honestly under asymmetric carbon information. Then this paper verifies the results of the coordination by using the numerical analysis method.