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.

Aiming at exploring the interplay principles of operations strategies among members of dvertising and emission reduction cost sharing contracts and coordination in low-carbon sulow-carbon supply chain, as well as their impact on system performance, we develop an evolutionary game model to capture emission reduction and low-carbon promotion actions, which are typically conducted by one manufacturer and one retailer in every two-echelon supply chain, respectively. We exploit the evolutionary game model to analyze players’ behavioral patterns of their interacting strategies, whereby we attain the evolutionary stable strategies and their associated existing preconditions under various scenarios. We acquire a number of managerial insights, and particularly find that the evolutionary stable strategies of the channel carbon reduction and promotion are remarkably influenced by incremental profits resulted from causes, such as every player’s unilateral participation in emission reduction. In addition, we investigate a player’s free-rider opportunistic practice in cooperative carbon reduction and joint participation in emission reduction. However, the magnitude of profit increment will heavily influence the result of Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS). Finally, the extensive computational studies enable us to verify the effectiveness of preceding models.

Innovation is the primary driving force for development, and green innovation efficiency (GIE) plays a key role in regional sustainable development. Moreover, environmental regulations (ERs) are also crucial for innovation and green transformation. Considering the heterogeneity of ERs, we assess the dynamic GIE in the industrial sectors of China. We detect their spatial clustering characteristics, and distinguish the impacts of ERs. Results suggest that there exist significant differences in GIE. Provinces such as Hainan, Guangdong and Zhejiang are ranked high, while Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia are ranked at the bottom, which shows some spatial dependence. The relationship between the administrative regulation and GIE demonstrates a U-shape, and has not reached a critical point, whereas the relationship between the market-based regulation and GIE possesses an inverted U-shape, which is highly significant. Furthermore, a positive linear relationship exists between the lagged public participation regulation and GIE. This paper also proposes that the economic development level and industrial structure are vital factors in accelerating industrial GIE. These conclusions provide scientific support for formulating regional transformation strategies.