Carbon Emission Reduction And Pricing Decisions In A Supply Chain With Complementary Products Considering Government Subsidies

With the refinement of production division and the increasingly fierce market competition,complementary products have attracted widespread attention.Due to the characteristics of co-consumption of complementary products,in many cases,consumers’ purchasing behavior is not only determined by the price and performance of the product itself,but also affected by the price and performance of its complementary product.Therefore,complementary firms targeting the same sales market are interrelated,and the operational decisions of one firm affect the market performance of another,and vice versa.How companies use the correlation and complementarity between products to make pricing decisions is an important issue.In addition,with the environmental problems getting worse,people’s awareness of environmental protection is rapidly increasing,and the low-carbon supply chain has received extensive attention.In the context of low-carbon supply chain,how the government implements appropriate subsidy policies to mobilize the enthusiasm of manufacturers to produce low-carbon products has important practical significance.Based on the above analysis,this paper considers a secondary supply chain system composed of two complementary manufacturers and a common retailer,and establishes a Stackelberg game model with the manufacturers as the leader and the retailer as the follower.The optimal price decision and optimal carbon emission reduction level decision of the complementary products are studied under different subsidy methods,namely the non-government subsidy,the R＆D cost subsidy for emission reduction and the emission reduction subsidy per unit product.Then the optimal decisions of supply chain under different subsidy methods are compared and analyzed.The specific research contents are as follows:Firstly,three decision-making models,namely,no carbon emission reduction by two manufacturers,carbon emission reduction by single manufacturer,and carbon emission reduction by both manufacturers,are constructed without considering government subsidies.The optimal decision of the supply chain and the optimal profit of each member under three models are compared to analyze the impact of the manufacturer’s carbon emission reduction behavior on the equilibrium solution of decision variables and the profit of each member.Secondly,considering that the government adopts two methods to subsidize the manufacturers,namely,the R＆D cost subsidy for emission reduction and the emission reduction subsidy per unit product,two decision-making models for carbon emission reduction of a single manufacturer and carbon emission reduction of two manufacturers are constructed.The optimal decision of the supply chain and the optimal profit of each member under different subsidy methods are obtained and then compared with the case of without considering government subsidies to analyze the impact of different subsidy methods on the equilibrium solution of decision variables and the profit of each member.Finally,the effects of the R＆D cost subsidy for emission reduction and the emission reduction subsidy per unit product are compared and analyzed from the perspective of the government and manufacturers respectively,to provide strategic support for the relevant decision-making of the government and enterprises.Research shows that,regardless of the government’s subsidy method,it is a winwin for both manufacturers to reduce carbon emissions at the same time;When manufacturers carry out carbon emission reduction,the optimal wholesale price,optimal retail price and optimal carbon emission reduction level of their products are positively related to consumers’ low carbon preference,and negatively related to the R＆D cost coefficient of carbon emission reduction and the degree of product complementarity;Compared with no government subsidies,both subsidy methods are conducive to improving the carbon emission reduction level of manufacturers,the profits of retailers and the profits of the overall supply chain;When the evaluation criteria of subsidy effects are different,the results of the selection of subsidy methods are also different.The government and manufacturers can choose the subsidy method that maximizes their decision-making goals according to the magnitude of the two subsidy coefficients and other relevant parameters.