Carbon sinks under carbon trading system: Timing of plant tissue culture technique sharing and optimal mode selection for a manufacturer

With the development of modern agriculture, the plant tissue culture (PTC) technique has been applied by more and more manufacturers. We in this work consider an agricultural supply chain consisting of two manufacturers where one is a regular manufacturer and the other is a manufacturer that owns the plant tissue culture (PTC) technique (PTC manufacturer). The latter may share this technique with the former in either revenue-sharing or pre-product selling modes. The main research questions of this paper are to analyze whether to introduce the PTC technique, and the selection of revenue-sharing mode and pre-product selling mode. First, in the revenue-sharing mode, the optimal profit of the regular manufacturer adopting this technique always increases while the optimal profit of the PTC manufacturer increases (decreases) after sharing this technique at the low (high) unit carbon absorption. In the pre-product selling mode, the regular manufacturer’s optimal profit decreases (increases) after adopting this technique at the low (high) PTC quantity power, while the PTC manufacturer’s optimal profit always increases after sharing this technique. Second, at the low revenue-sharing rate, the optimal profit of the regular (PTC) manufacturer is lower (higher) in the pre-product selling mode than in the revenue-sharing mode. Nevertheless, we interestingly discover that at the high revenue-sharing rate, the optimal profit of the regular manufacturer is higher (lower) in the pre-product selling mode than in the revenue-sharing mode at low (high) unit carbon absorption. In contrast, for the PTC manufacturer, the opposite result holds. In addition, we make several extensions.