This paper mainly aims at investigating the governments’ take-back policy of penalty or subsidy that motivates eco-design or remanufacturing. For this purpose, we consider a two-stage Stackelberg game between a government and a manufacturer. The government first decides to impose a take-back penalty or offer a take-back subsidy, and then the manufacturer selects to remanufacture or invest in eco-design as a response to the take-back policy. Upon analyzing and comparing game equilibrium, we find that the government prefers to offer a subsidy policy for eco-design and to impose a penalty policy for remanufacturing. The manufacturer will decide on investing in eco-design when the monetary value of the environmental impact of landfill and eco-design coefficient is medium. However, if the eco-design coefficient is high, the manufacturer practices remanufacturing instead of eco-design whether penalized and subsidized. The present study provides a set of guidelines in practical managerial recommendations for governments and manufacturers.

Governments of various countries have formulated relevant EPR environmental regulations for environmental pollution caused by electrical and electronic products, and enterprises mainly respond to this regulation through product ecodesign strategies. In view of this, this paper takes a three-stage supply chain system composed of a manufacturer, a retailer and a third-party recycler as the research object, and develops a demand-oriented product ecodesign strategy for five scenarios under different environmental regulations, including eco-input subsidy, sales subsidy, consumption subsidy and recycling subsidy. This study finds that the manufacturer does not actively engage in product ecodesign if the government does not implement subsidy policies; when the government implements subsidy policies such as eco-input subsidy, sales subsidy, or consumption subsidy, the manufacturer will design a high-level ecological product. However, under the recycling subsidy policy, the manufacturer will design a low-level ecological product. These results suggest that different subsidy policies may lead to different eco-product strategies of the manufacturer. In particular, the recycling subsidy policy can encourage a recycler to recycle actively, thus reducing the environmental pollution cost of a manufacturer, but the manufacturer is reluctant to improve the ecological level of the finished product.

Many companies make some stakeholders pleased but others cannot. To help understand why, it is very important to study the coexistence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). This paper considers a manufacturer with irresponsibility risk in a centralized and decentralized socially responsible supply chain, and uses a Stackelberg game to investigate the optimal policies on price and CSR investment level. This paper also examines the influence of consumer responsibility awareness and CSR investment efficiency on the decision behaviors of the manufacturer and retailer. Moreover, we developed a new mechanism to coordinate the decentralized supply chain system, which consists of the retailer participating in CSR and revenue sharing. Our results indicate that the manufacturer’s and retailer’s optimal decisions may not be significantly influenced by consumer responsibility awareness, but the effect of CSR investment efficiency is significant. Our results also show that if the degree of retailer participation and the proportion of revenue sharing are of moderate size, then not only can the contract mechanism coordinate the decentralized socially responsible supply chain, but it can ensure that a win–win situation can be achieved by the supply chain members.