Carbon tax policy is widely adopted by many countries to curb carbon emissions. In the context of carbon tax policy, firms have more incentive to improve carbon reduction levels by reducing their carbon tax costs. However, firms need to bear carbon reduction costs that may cause shortage of capital. Thus, firms may face problems of financial constraints, which may demotivate firms to produce greener products. To address the decision‐making challenges of firms in the contexts of carbon tax policy and financial constraints, we consider a supply chain with a manufacturer who produces green products and a retailer who sells these products. Our study develops five models to investigate the two firms’ optimal wholesale price, carbon reduction level and ordering quantity, according to the manufacturer and retailer with or without financial constraints. Our goal in this study is to explore how carbon tax policy and banks’ interest rates affect the profits of the two firms, supply chain and consumer surplus. Certain managerial insights are obtained as follows. We demonstrate that carbon tax policy and banks’ interest rates demotivate the manufacturer to produce greener products and demotivate the retailer to order more products. If the interest rate to the manufacturer (retailer) is relatively low, then the manufacturer with financial constraint benefits (harms) the consumers compared with the retailer with financial constraint. Importantly, our analysis suggests that carbon tax policy harms the firms but benefits consumers, and the government in some conditions should reduce unit carbon tax.

The green supply chain (GSC) can effectively reduce the waste of resources and avoid environmental pollution. For a closed-loop supply chain network consisting of multiple manufacturers, multiple retailers, and multiple consumer and recycling markets, we assume that retailers are responsible for the recycling of used products, manufacturers use raw materials to produce new products and recycled products for remanufacturing, and government departments subsidize all manufacturers and retailers for GSC technology investment. Then, the equilibrium conditions of manufacturers, retailers, demand markets, and recycling markets are obtained by using the variational inequality method, complementarity theorem, and Nash equilibrium theory, and the variational inequality model of the closed-loop supply chain network multiphase equilibrium is established. Based on numerical simulation, the optimal technology investment decision of green supply chain under different government subsidy rates, and the influence of market structure and enterprise cost asymmetry on the equilibrium solution of supply chain network are analyzed. The results show that government subsidies can effectively promote enterprises to upgrade their level of GSC technology investment. The intensification of enterprise competition and the asymmetry of enterprise costs will affect the composition of enterprise profits and the allocation of profits between enterprises, and the former will weaken the effect of government subsidies.

The reduction of fresh agricultural product volume loss throughout the supply chain system is of high importance due to their perishable nature and impact on society, the economy, and environment. In this paper, three models for two-stage pricing, coordination, and volume loss reduction of the supply chain where third-party logistics service providers and retailers act as a Stackelberg leader and a follower for fresh agricultural products are developed, taking into account both volume loss during transport and quality loss in retail in the presence of strategic consumers. The following results are drawn from the contract for sharing revenues and service costs: (1) The supply chain achieve coordination and the products are healthier for consumers; (2) the coordination leads to a reduction in the three types of volume losses simultaneously only if the lowest marginal costs of the supply chain occur under certain conditions; and (3) the increase in the service sensitivity coefficient, the increase in the freshness discount coefficient under certain conditions, the decrease in the consumer benefit discount coefficient under certain conditions, and the decrease in the price sensitivity coefficient lead to an increase in the profit of the supply chain and a reduction in the three types of volume losses.

The popularity of e-commerce has impacted traditional retail business. Farmer cooperatives running green agri-food pick-your-own (PYO) farms are facing the choice of whether or not to adopt online channels. PYO operation refers to consumers picking and purchasing the agri-food growing on a farm, and due to it being environmentally-friendly, healthy, and popular, it has been widely adopted by many farm cooperatives. This paper aims to discuss the practicality of introducing online channels to already established PYO farms in the green agri-food supply chain (GASC), who can personally take charge of the online channel or transfer it to one online retailer. Firstly, we constructed the demand functions of green agri-food by putting consumer utility, the freshness of agri-food, and transportation cost into consideration. Secondly, five decision models are built to characterize five operation modes, namely pure PYO mode, self-operated dual-channel mode, decentralized dual-channel mode, centralized dual-channel mode, and contractual cooperation mode. Furthermore, by taking price, demand, and profit with different modes into consideration, we are able to explore the introduction of online channels and green brand construction. Finally, numerical analysis is performed. We found that: (1) introducing an online channel is preferable strategy since the profit of the farmer cooperative in pure PYO mode is always less than the profit of a farmer cooperative in non-self-operated dual-channel modes; (2) the decision of self-operating an online channel is related to the fixed cost of creating a new online channel and the green food brand effect of online channel, and it is the optimal mode in some cases, while the contractual cooperation mode is the optimal mode in the remaining cases; and (3) the green food brand effect of online channels is does not necessarily improve with scale, and the initial freshness has a positive relationship to the profit, demand, and price of farmer cooperatives and online retailers.

This paper aims to investigate the optimal strategies for both centralized and decentralized modes in a two-echelon omni-channel organic agricultural supply chain (OASC) which consists of one farmer cooperative and one online retailer. Furthermore, the contracts of cooperation between the members in OASC are discussed. Based on both theory differential game and bi-level programming, we utilize the Nerlove–Arrow model and Stackelberg model to examine five cases of decision modes for both agents in the OASC. Then, we achieve the optimal strategies where the specified sets of organic growing effort, organic traceability technology effort, propaganda input, and service input can guarantee the maximization of the related profits. As a result, we could obtain the values of the corresponding optimal profits. For the centralized decision mode, the farmer cooperative and the online retailer make decisions with the goal of maximizing the overall profits of the OASC. Meanwhile, for the decentralized decision mode with four different cases, each member will independently make a decision with the goal of maximizing his own profit respectively. In detail, as for the fully decentralized decision mode, no contracts exist in OASC; regarding the decentralized decision mode with an information traceability cost sharing contract, two members pay the information traceability cost together; and for the decentralized decision mode with a revenue sharing contract, two members share the revenue together; as to the decentralized decision mode with a comprehensive contract, there are two cooperative ways that information traceability cost sharing and revenue sharing can be achieved. In addition, we also considered factors such as the consumer preferences of organic products and the cross influence between channels in models. Finally, through sensitivity analysis and comparison of optimal strategies and profits, we found that: (1) high consumer preferences of organic products and high cross influence between channels are profitable; and (2) the choice of contract is influenced by the relative size of the offline marginal income ratio and the online marginal income ratio.