Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to employ an emerging phenomenon in China concerning collaborative carbon emission reduction (CCER) to investigate: first, the coordination of suppliers and manufacturers within supply chains to reduce carbon emissions, and second, the role of governmental policy in facilitating this process. Design/methodology/approach: This paper draws upon evolutionary game theory to develop an evolutionary game model for CCER for suppliers and manufacturers within supply chains. This includes a detailed analysis of the evolutionary direction and process in different areas, both with, and in the absence of, governmental subsidies. Findings: The results demonstrate that CCER is path dependent and that its evolutionary process is influenced by the following four factors: the initial status within supply chains; the cost; the additional benefit; and the investment risk related to CCER. The research also reveals that the reward provided by manufacturers is rational over the long term, due to the excessive cost of incentives potentially preventing the implementation of CCER. Originality/value: This study represents the first attempt to investigate CCER within supply chains through the application of an evolutionary game-theoretic model. The investigation of multiple factors in the model will deepen understanding of the collaborative role required for the carbon emission reduction.

The continuous increase of carbon emissions is a serious challenge all over the world, and many countries are striving to solve this problem. Since 2020, a widespread lockdown in the country to prevent the spread of COVID-19 escalated, severely restricting the movement of people and unnecessary economic activities, which unexpectedly reduced carbon emissions. This paper aims to analyze the carbon emissions data of 30 provinces in the 2020 and provide references for reducing emissions with epidemic lockdown measures. Based on the method of time series visualization, we transform the time series data into complex networks to find out the hidden information in these data. We found that the lockdown would bring about a short-term decrease in carbon emissions, and most provinces have a short time point of impact, which is closely related to the level of economic development and industrial structure. The current results provide some insights into the evolution of carbon emissions under COVID-19 blockade measures and valuable insights into energy conservation and response to the energy crisis in the post-epidemic era.

Although collaborative decision-making with multiple stakeholders in supply chain has become an important research issue in recent years, current research on the mechanism/process, methods, and performance assessment of collaborative decision-making still lags behind the practical needs in supply chain management. This paper reviews the existing literature in the past decade on collaborative supply chain from the perspective of decision-making in four stages with a causal framework. This paper reveals a general retrospect of the main subjects developed and investigated with related applications of cases, which includes both theoretical assumptions and practical data. The findings indicate that most articles in this field are based on a direct relationship between collaboration and performance improvement but lack of a mechanism between them. Additionally, dynamic collaboration with members in the whole supply chain both horizontally and vertically has not been conducted by previous studies. This paper provides a new conceptual framework and future research directions for further study in supply chain collaboration.