Background: In response to the specific goals of carbon peaking and neutrality, remanufacture is becoming increasingly popular. With the marketplace being more and more adopted, an independent remanufacturer (IR) could sell its products via either the reselling model or the marketplace model. In order to contribute more to carbon neutrality, we investigate the optimal marketing decision for remanufacturing. We construct two models namely reselling model and the marketplace model, and further explore the effects of each marketing model on the decisions and profits of both the IR and the platform firm. Methods: We examine a platform firm that sells new products and an IR that sells remanufactured products under two marketing models based on game theory: (1) a reselling model in which the IR sells remanufactured products to the platform firm; then the platform firm resells to consumers; (2) a marketplace model in which the IR sells remanufactured products to consumers through the platform. Results: Our results show that aiming at carbon neutrality, the IR would be induced by the marketplace model to undertake remanufacturing operations and remanufacture products as many as it could still meet the market demand. Meanwhile, the marketplace model encourages the IR to rethink its work and manufacture more products under certain conditions. Furthermore, both the platform firm and the IR prefer the marketplace model to the reselling model within a Pareto zone. In addition, we find that both the platform firm and the IR could benefit from the marketplace model when they take carbon neutrality under consideration. Conclusions: This study provides managerial insight from two aspects. Remanufactures could decide their marketing model via thorough consideration of market competition, commission rate, and production cost. The government could do more to protect the marketplace environment in order to stimulate the internal vitality of the platform in the achievement march of carbon neutrality purpose. That is, this study will provide good guidance for sustainable development decision-making of remanufacturing marketing platforms, and further contributes to the achievement of the carbon neutrality goal.

Low-carbon production is a vital solution for many environmental problems, as is consumers’ consciousness about carbon playing a more important role and ultimately passing upstream. Supply chains are eager to seek sustainable development via appropriate decision making with data-driven methods. Consistent with this aim, we investigated decisions toward lower carbon efforts and prices in a two-echelon supply chain via a game theoretical approach. The decision-making scenarios of decentralized, centralized, and cost-sharing contracts were investigated and compared. The results show that the level of improvement in environmental performance is positively correlated with the degree of cooperation between partners. Cooperation between partners would be even more significant with an increase in consumers’ low carbon awareness. Furthermore, cost-sharing contracts improve the performance of the entire supply chain compared with decentralized cases. Finally, we implemented numerical experiments to verify the modeling results. Therefore, this study provides theoretical support toward sustainable operations for supply chains concerning low carbon awareness.

At present, corporate social responsibility has been widely mentioned by the international society, especially platform enterprises. For a platform that assumes social responsibilities, consumer surplus is a rather critical aspect, and product quality is one of the most important factors directly related to consumers. This paper studies a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailing platform, in which the retailing platform procures products from the manufacturer. The manufacturer produces the products and decides the product quality. We consider two channel structures of the manufacturer and the retailing platform in the reseller mode and marketplace mode. Based on the model analysis and discussions, we obtain some managerial insights that are helpful in commercial practice. For the retailing platform, it has to suffer a loss in economic profit to care more about consumer surplus and become a social responsibility platform. In addition, its social responsibility plays different roles in different channel structures. In the marketplace mode, a social responsibility retailing platform helps to improve product quality. In the reseller mode, the retailing platform’s social responsibility does not make a change in product quality. Furthermore, the product quality in the reseller mode is always higher than that in the marketplace mode. From the perspective of economic profits, the manufacturer obtains higher profits in the reseller mode than the marketplace mode. The retailing platform obtains higher profits in the marketplace mode than the reseller mode.