Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to generate quantitative managerial insights for the improvement of the energy-saving potential and the coordinated development between economic growth and environmental protection. Design/methodology/approach: A novel data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, based on the classical DEA theory, is developed from the perspective of emission reduction. Findings: The empirical results indicate that China’s overall environmental efficiency is low and that there is huge improvement space for energy saving. Under the concerns of emission reduction, the energy-saving potential of the central region exceeds that of both the eastern and western regions. With regard to water, electricity and gas consumption, the electricity-saving potential exceeds the potential for both water saving and gas saving. Originality/value: Previous studies rarely focused on the energy-saving potential, while considering environmental pollution. This paper applies a novel DEA method to evaluate the energy-saving potential of 30 Chinese provinces for 2015 with a focus on emission reduction concerns. Furthermore, both regional differences and energy type differences of the saving potential were analyzed.

With the streaming media industry's rapid growth, platforms like Netflix and Disney+, are transitioning from content distributors to producers. They can operate as distributors (pure agency), create content (self-production), or collaborate with producers (collaboration). We develop an analytical model to examine the optimal content provision strategy for the platform. Our results reveal several insights. First, the optimal strategy depends on creative efficiency and collaboration effectiveness. Second, a greater influence or revenue sharing rate in collaboration does not necessarily result in higher profits for either the platform or the pure content producer. Last, when the creative efficiency of the platform is high, only the collaboration strategy has the potential to achieve a win-win result. However, when the creative efficiency of the platform is low, the pure agency strategy can also achieve a win-win outcome. Our work underscores that streaming platforms should make careful decisions about whether to collaborate with content providers, even if collaboration reduces costs, as this could adversely affect the platforms' profits.