Research On Low-Carbon Supply Chain Decision-Making Under Capital Constraints And Chain-to-Chain Competition

The climate crisis caused by greenhouse gas emissions drives emission-reduction actions around the world.China has aroused the goal of peaking carbon and becoming carbon neutral.To achieve the goal,manufacturers adopt remanufacturing and low-carbon production to control emissions.However,high production costs in enterprise low-carbon transformation often result in capital constraints.And the competition between enterprises has gradually evolved into the competition between supply chains.Aiming at the low-carbon supply chain model under capital constraints and inter-chain competition,this paper studies the decision-making of production,pricing,and emission reduction,and discusses the selection of operation model and financing strategy.The main work and important research conclusions are as follows.Considering the low-carbon supply chains under capital constraints,this paper built direct selling and reselling models respectively.The optimal decisions are solved through the Stackelberg game and nonlinear programming.Numerical simulation is used to verify conclusions.Comparative analysis is conducted to explore the low-carbon manufacturer’s preference for operation model.The research shows that adopting the Carbon Emission Permits Repurchase Strategy is conducive to promoting the production of low-carbon remanufactured products.In the direct selling model,a higher end-of-period carbon price is not always beneficial for the environment.Specifically,when the carbon cap is low,a lower end-of-period carbon price brings higher carbon productivity,while a higher end-of-period carbon price is more favorable to the manufacturer’s comprehensive performance when the carbon cap is high.In the reselling model,as the end-of-period carbon price increases,carbon productivity decreases first and then increases with the carbon cap.Moreover,the manufacturer’s preference for the operation model is affected by the carbon cap.Specifically,the low-cap manufacturer prefers the direct selling model,while the high-cap manufacturer prefers cooperating with the retailer and operating in reselling model.This paper introduces inter-chain competition into the low-carbon supply chain under capital constraints and constructs the low-carbon supply chain models considering bank financing and prepayment financing respectively to analyze the impact of market competition.Equilibrium solutions are derived by game theory to explore the low-carbon manufacturer’s financing strategy boundary under inter-chain competition.The research shows that with the improvement of consumers’ low-carbon preference,no matter which financing method is selected,the supply chain of low-carbon products is always benefited,the manufacturer’s motivation for low-carbon financing is enhanced,and the supply chain of ordinary products cannot benefit from ‘small profit and quick turnover’.Low-carbon production cannot improve the negative impact of increased competition intensity on corporate profits.The financing model with a higher low-carbon level is not always beneficial for the low-carbon manufacturer.Specifically,compared with bank financing,prepayment financing is more favorable to improve the emission-reduction level.But when the probability of obtaining a bank loan exceeds the critical value,the manufacturer’s profit in the bank financing model is higher.Moreover,an increased low-carbon investment cost coefficient will lower the critical value,which is counterintuitive.Since the preference interval for the downstream retailer to provide prepayments is larger than the interval for the low-carbon manufacturer to choose prepayment financing,both parties have the incentive to negotiate prepayments.Different from the non-competition supply chain,when the low-carbon manufacturer under inter-chain competition adopts prepayment financing,the upstream and downstream enterprises cannot improve their profits by adjusting the wholesale price discount.