Green sensitivity in supply chain management: An evolutionary game theory approach

Reducing carbon emissions is a shared responsibility for the sustainable development of humanity. The green supply chain, as one of the most crucial frameworks for addressing low-carbon issues, has been extensively studied from the perspective of evolutionary game theory. Previous research, which primarily focused on the design of government incentives, has found that incorporating green sensitivity can promote the green supply chain to achieve an ideal state. However, there has been a lack of investigation into the role of green sensitivity when government incentives prove to be ineffective. In this paper, we introduce green sensitivity into the green supply chain system and establish an evolutionary game model between enterprises and consumers. By analyzing the replicator equation, we find that the system exhibits periodic oscillatory dynamics where the frequencies of green enterprise and green consumers fluctuate between presence and absence in a periodic manner. In addition, the green supply chain system can attain an ideal state in which all enterprises adopt green production strategy and all consumers engage in green consumption, and we theoretically prove that this ideal state is evolutionarily stable. We validate our theoretical results through numerical simulations. Our work may provide some useful insights into managing of green supply chain.