Purpose: Outsourcing remanufacturing is a major form of remanufacturing, and emission reduction is an important part of a manufacturer's production. This paper aims to investigate carbon emission reduction strategies in a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) with outsourcing remanufacturing and design a contract to coordinate the CLSC.Design/methodology/approach: The authors establish two-period game models between an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and third-party remanufacturer (TPR) in different scenarios, including decentralized decision, centralized decision and coordinated decision. Furthermore, the authors study the optimal decisions by maximizing the profit model. The authors also investigate the impact of a carbon tax and emission reduction on the optimal decisions through comparative analysis.Findings: Emission reduction increases the quantity of new products and the OEM's profit. However, emission reduction decreases the outsourcing fee, which is not conducive to remanufacturing; thus, the TPR's profit does not necessarily increase. Compared with a decentralized scenario, the output of remanufactured products and the total profit increase. When the acceptance level of remanufactured products is high enough or when emissions from remanufacturing are low enough, the total carbon emissions are reduced in the centralized scenario. For the coordination of the CLSC, the OEM needs to increase the outsourcing fee and the TPR needs to share part of the emission reduction costs.Research limitations/implications: The TPR can choose three different remanufacturing strategies, namely, no remanufacturing, partial remanufacturing or full remanufacturing. For the majority of firms, it is difficult to remanufacture all used products. Therefore, the analysis is based only on partial remanufacturing.Practical implications: The results provide insights for remanufacturing and emission reduction decisions, as well as a decision basis for the cooperation between the OEM and TPR.Originality/value: The authors combine the OEM's carbon emission reduction with outsourcing remanufacturing, and investigate the impact of technological spillover on the TPR's profit.

Online retailing provides alternative shopping channels, where the retail platform can either let manufacturers directly sell to consumers or open a self-operated channel, or even both. Regardless of sales channels, consumers often pay attention to the income gap between themselves and enterprises (namedconsumer’s fairness concern). In this work, we explore how consumers’ fairness concerns affect the optimal decisions of both manufacturer and retail platform under different retail channel modes (single-channel mode and mixed-channel mode). The results show that consumer’s fairness concern has a negative impact on the retail price under low production cost in single-channel mode, while the retail prices in mix-channel mode are jointly determined by consumer’s fairness concern and revenue sharing ratio. Besides, if the market channel mode has not yet formed, the retail platform can choose either a self-operated channel or manufacturer consignment channel, depending on the consumer’s fairness concern level and revenue sharing ratio. By contrast, if the market channel mode has already been formed, the retail platform should make effort to reduce consumer’s fairness concern if only the self-operated channel exists, while maintain consumer’s fairness concern and revenue sharing ratio at a moderate level if there exist mixed channels.