The Evolutionary Game Theoretic Analysis for Emission Reduction and Promotion in Low-Carbon Supply Chains

Aiming at exploring the interplay principles of operations strategies among members of dvertising and emission reduction cost sharing contracts and coordination in low-carbon sulow-carbon supply chain, as well as their impact on system performance, we develop an evolutionary game model to capture emission reduction and low-carbon promotion actions, which are typically conducted by one manufacturer and one retailer in every two-echelon supply chain, respectively. We exploit the evolutionary game model to analyze players’ behavioral patterns of their interacting strategies, whereby we attain the evolutionary stable strategies and their associated existing preconditions under various scenarios. We acquire a number of managerial insights, and particularly find that the evolutionary stable strategies of the channel carbon reduction and promotion are remarkably influenced by incremental profits resulted from causes, such as every player’s unilateral participation in emission reduction. In addition, we investigate a player’s free-rider opportunistic practice in cooperative carbon reduction and joint participation in emission reduction. However, the magnitude of profit increment will heavily influence the result of Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS). Finally, the extensive computational studies enable us to verify the effectiveness of preceding models.