Cross effects of government subsidies and corporate social responsibility on carbon emissions reductions in an omnichannel supply chain system

As online shopping continues to grow, more manufacturers are gradually bracing themselves for both online and traditional marketing, then the omnichannel supply chain (OSC) becomes popular. An OSC has two marketing channels and they may compete with each other for selling the same product. Since emission reduction has become a national consensus and the government may encourage the supply chain to reduce emissions by subsidies and corporate social responsibility (CSR), the OSC members have to change their strategies accordingly. To reveal the interactive effects of subsidies and CSR on emissions in an OSC system, two decentralized decision-making models with/without subsidies are designed to investigate their effects on product prices, profits, and carbon emissions. Then a cost-sharing contract model is developed to coordinate their behaviors to minimize carbon emissions. We find that: (1) a higher cross-price elasticity between two channels can reduce emissions and improve the profits of the OSC members; (2) both subsidy and CSR can reduce emissions and improve the overall supply chain profits; (3) the cost-sharing contract can coordinate the OSC members to reach a Pareto improvement. This paper contributes to revealing the cross effects of subsidies and CSR in an OSC system and designing a cost-sharing contract to achieve a Pareto optimization in reducing carbon emissions.