A green supply chain, as one of the most critical low-carbon strategies, has been widely studied along with evolutionary game theory, for which governmental policies, such as a carbon tax, subsidies, or penalties, have been frequently applied; however, green sensitivity has been little explored. In this study, a general evolutionary game model composed of green-sensitive governments, enterprises, and consumers is built by considering the policy factors, and the evolutionary stable strategies of this model are solved. The solution results reveal that the green sensitivities significantly affect the evolutionary dynamics and stable strategies of the model. Green supply chains can evolve from low to advanced stages as the green sensitivities increase. At low development stages, governments must take the lead in enhancing their green sensitivity, resort to two key composite policy factor solutions, and encourage enterprises and consumers to increase their green sensitivities and drive them to adopt green strategies. As the green sensitivities of both enterprises and consumers have progressively increased to a certain high level, governments can adopt a nonsupervision strategy, reaching an advanced evolutionary stable strategy with the enterprises and consumers having complete autonomy. Therefore, green sensitivity has been proven to be a substitute for policy factors for green supply chain development. Moreover, the advanced strategy cannot be reached by any policy factor composition without green sensitivity. The findings above clarify the significance of green sensitivity, indicating that specific government policies based on the specific green sensitivities of the three parties can improve green supply chain management.

This paper considers a fresh food supply chain with a supplier who takes responsibility for the cold chain and a retailer who needs to reprocess the fresh food. Carbon emissions will be produced in the processes of production, transportation, processing, etc. We consider the four-stage game, obtain the function expressions of optimal market prices with respect to carbon emission reduction level (CERL), analyze the best responses of the supplier and the retailer regarding their CERLs, and obtain the 25 optimal CERLs under competitive equilibrium. In 24 of the 25 equilibrium cases, the supplier or the retailer either do nothing to reduce carbon emissions, or make the most effort to reduce carbon emissions. Excluding these special cases, we focused on a non-trivial case where the increasing consumer preferences for low-carbon products will encourage the supplier and the retailer to reduce carbon emissions. Interestingly, we find that when the consumer preference for low-carbon products is low, the retailer’s and supplier’s equilibrium carbon reduction levels are low, so that the potential market size is small such that the competition for two kinds of customers is fierce. Then, an increase in the sale cost will reduce the retail price. However, when the consumer preference for low-carbon products is high, the potential market size is large such that the competition is not fierce. Then, an increase in the sale cost will advance the retail price.