Sustainable Cross-Border Maritime Logistics: Platform Environmental Responsibility and Green Governance

Cross-border e-commerce increases the demand for maritime logistics and creates new environmental governance challenges. This study examines how platform environmental responsibility and green incentives influence sustainable governance in cross-border maritime logistics. A multi-actor Stackelberg decision model involving a regulatory authority, a platform, and merchants is developed for three logistics modes. Using industry-informed normalized parameter settings and a feasibility-screened constrained-equilibrium procedure, the analysis compares platform green governance effort, merchant green participation, modeled residual environmental loss, welfare, and profit outcomes. In the documented baseline scenarios, stronger platform responsibility increases platform governance effort, whereas merchant participation and platform profit decline. The welfare response is conditional on the feasible parameter region and must be assessed jointly with responsibility-related cost. Green incentives increase both platform and merchant efforts in the modeled scenarios. These results are comparative model implications under documented parameter assumptions rather than direct empirical estimates of emissions, costs, or policy effects for a particular platform or route.