Economic Performance and Emission Reduction of Supply Chains in Different Power Structures: Perspective of Sustainable Investment

Environmental issues have increasingly received attention in both industry and academia. Many firms have started to make sustainable investments, such as adopting the pollution-abatement technologies, to reduce carbon emissions. To investigate the impacts of the sustainable investment on firms' profit and emission reduction, we consider supply chains with uncertain demand in different power structures. Specifically, we examine the sustainable investment problem in three supply chain power structures, i.e., manufacturer Stackelberg (MS) power structure, vertical Nash (VN) power structure and retailer Stackelberg (RS) power structure. We first derive the optimal decisions for both the retailer and manufacturer in each power structure. Then, by comparing the results in the three power structures, we find that the manufacturer gets benefits from making the sustainable investment, especially in unequal power structures. When the average market size is large (small) enough, both of the supply chain members obtain more profits in the MS (RS) power structure. From an environmental perspective, we find that the emission reduction is more significant in sequential games (i.e., MS and RS power structures) than that in a simultaneous game (i.e., VN power structure). In addition, we conduct some numerical studies and discuss more managerial insights in the paper.