Green product supply chain contracts considering environmental responsibilities

Environmental sustainability has become an important metric for assessing the success of supply chain management. We study several cooperation contracts within a green product supply chain and investigate their environmental performance. Stakeholders’ environmental responsibilities are considered in a two-echelon supply chain in which consumers are environmentally conscious, a manufacturer designs and produces a green product, and a retailer promotes the green product in its marketplace through green marketing. This problem is analyzed and modeled under three contracts in order of increasing cooperation level: price-only, green-marketing cost-sharing, and two-part tariff contracts. The analytical results show that cooperation among partners can help the supply chain achieve environmental improvements. Cooperating contracts are valuable in practice because consumers are now paying more attention to sustainability and have become more environmentally conscious. A counterintuitive but interesting result is that cooperation may not always profitably benefit all partners; manufacturing becomes more profitable when the manufacturer shares the green-marketing cost with the retailer, whereas the retailer is worse off under the cost-sharing contract than under the price-only contract. This result is more significant when consumers’ green awareness increases. The results on social-welfare performance show that the supply chain’s social welfare increases with the increase of the supply chain’s cooperation level.