Climate warming nowadays has caused people to increasingly enhance public awareness about carbon emissions from industries. In the storing industry, inventory management for deteriorating items is crucial in the business competition. To slow down the deterioration and ensure the quality of products, the items are usually stored in certain temperature-controlled environment. However, a lot of carbon emissions of the inventory system are caused by these warehousing activities. In a finite panning period, this paper studies a continuous review inventory system and proposes inventory models to analyze the impacts of carbon emissions on inventory system for deteriorating items with a general time-varying demand, in which shortages are allowed, and the customer demand during shortage period is partially backlogged till the next replenishment. Under carbon emission regulations, the existence and uniqueness of the optimal solution to each model is explored and comparisons of optimality among the proposed models are given. Numerical examples and robust analysis of the models are presented to illustrate the applicability in practice. Some management insights about inventory policies and emission reduction strategies are obtained.

In this paper, we firstly investigate issues of low carbon supply chain including one retailer and one manufacturer in the context of joint information asymmetry and cap-and-trade mechanism, where the retailer is a leader and faces a stochastic demand, and the manufacturer is a follower and keeps private information in carbon emissions. Our aim is to design an incentive contract to make the manufacturer disclose the carbon information. Furthermore, we quantify the effects of the carbon price, the carbon emissions and the carbon quota on the supply chain model and design an incentive contract for improving supply chain performance. Finally, we give a couple of numerical examples and undertake sensitivity analysis to illustrate the proposed model and provide some managerial inferences in the conclusions.

Considering a nonperishable product which may be stored either in an own warehouse or in both the own and the rented warehouse, this paper deals with the ordering decisions under a generalized trapezoidal-type demand rate in an inventory system. Shortages are allowed and the unsatisfied demand is assumed to be partially backlogged. Furthermore, the existence and uniqueness of the optimal solution to each warehouse mode is proved and used in an easy-to-use algorithm, and a decision-making theorem for measuring whether to adopt a rented warehouse is developed. Finally, numerical examples and a case study are presented to illustrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm. The results show that, the storage capacity of the own warehouse and the unit rental cost have remarkable impact on determining whether to use the rented warehouse. When both the unit rental cost and the unit opportunity cost are higher in the external market, the profitability of the inventory system mainly relies on the storage capacity of the own warehouse. Meanwhile, the optimal profit performance is sensitive to the selling price and the purchasing cost, and the optimal rented warehouse’s ordering quantity is sensitive to the order cycle length. But overall, the proposed model is basically robust.

On-demand ride-sharing services change our travel behavior, which threatens the survival of taxi services. Motivated by this, this paper examines the impact of on-demand ride-sharing services on taxi services and how to achieve the coexistence of two services from a service quality perspective. This paper analyzes the coexistence condition of two services considering the network effect. First, the profit target for taxi drivers is nonnegative. A Stackelberg model is built in which the taxi service is the leader and the on-demand ride-sharing service is the follower. Then, the reference dependency theory is introduced to modify the profit target of taxi drivers. And the new coexistence condition is compared with the benchmark status. The results find that the coexistence of the two services depends on the type of riders and the quality difference in both cases. When two services and riders are highly heterogenous, two services are more likely to coexist. Services with different qualities could better satisfy the diverse preferences of riders. Considering taxi profit without competition as the profit reference point, the requirement of service quality difference and the diversity of rider composition is increased. In terms of the network effect, the negative network effect is more beneficial to the coexistence of two services.

Under low carbon environment, a multi-period emissions reduction problem for manufacturer is investigated in the paper, where we assume that the government sets mandatory carbon emissions limit to all the enterprises by free of charge and allows the carbon emission quota to be traded or banked inter-temporally in the carbon trading market. Using discrete-time optimal control theory, the optimal emission reduction strategies for each period are firstly explored for maximizing the sum of net profit under cap-and-trade. The optimal carbon emissions, permit trading quantity, and the number of buying Certified Emission Reduction (CER) are obtained in each period. Furthermore, the effects of carbon price and initial carbon quota given by the government on the firm’s emission reduction strategies are discussed. Finally, numerical examples are illustrated to verify the proposed model, and some managerial inferences for a multi-period emission reduction are provided in conclusions.