Pricing and carbon emission reduction decision in dual-channel supply chain with carbon tax and consumer preference

With the development of society and economy, the production methods that consuming a lot of resources are gradually unable to meet the needs of modern life. And with the rise of consumers' awareness of environmental protection, more and more low-carbon production of manufacturers have been put forward. In order to encourage manufacturers to product with low carbon, the carbon tax policy is proposed. Under the pressure of the new policy and consumers' environmental awareness, manufacturers' production decisions will face many challenges. In addition, the rapid development of the Internet and the popularity of online shopping have also enabled manufacturers to engage in online direct sales, which has many impacts on traditional retail. Under such circumstances, consumers' channel preferences will also have many influences on manufacturers' production decisions. Therefore, it is necessary to study the influence of carbon tax, consumer green preference and channel preference on supply chain members. Therefore, this study constructs a dual-channel supply chain model consisting of a single manufacturer and a retailer to determine the optimal pricing of supply chain members and minimum carbon emissions of the manufacturer in the two scenarios of centralized decision-making and decentralized decision-making, respectively. The impact of consumers' environmental awareness, carbon tax rates and consumers' channel preferences on the carbon emissions of products and the profits of manufacturers and retailers are analyzed. The research results show that: when the carbon tax rate is low, with the rising of consumers' awareness of environmental protection and carbon tax, it is necessary to increase the carbon tax on clean manufacturers to enable them to take more market share, and increase the carbon tax on low carbon emission manufacturers to force them to make more efforts on clean manufacturing. Besides, low-carbon taxes should be imposed on medium carbon emission manufacturers to avoid them from going back to high-polluting production, and on high carbon emission manufacturers, so that they will have more funds to carry out cleaner production reforms. Besides, shopping online should be encouraged.