Pricing and Carbon Emission Reduction Decisions in a Supply Chain with a Risk-Averse Retailer under Carbon Tax Regulation

Carbon tax is an emission regulation, which widely used to curb the carbon emissions generated from firms. In the context of carbon tax policy, firms need to determine an optimal carbon reduction level and optimal product prices. To address firms’ decision-making challenges, this paper considers a two-echelon supply chain consisting of a single manufacturer and a single retailer under carbon tax policy; it establishes a Stackelberg game model with a risk-averse retailer and a risk-neutral manufacturer who is the leader of the game. The paper studies the influence of the government’s carbon tax policy and retailer’s risk-averse attitude on the optimal decision of the supply chain. The result shows that when the retailer is risk aversion, the degree of risk aversion of the retailer is positively correlated with the wholesale price of the manufacturer and unit carbon emission reduction, and within a certain range of carbon emission reduction cost coefficient, it is positively correlated with the price of products; with the increase of the carbon tax rate imposed by the government, the retail price of unit products, the wholesale price of the manufacturer, and the carbon emission reduction of unit products also increase. Finally, the results are verified by numerical examples.