The decision making of product greenness and pricing strategy is important to achieve sustainable competitiveness of supply chain systems. Behavioral studies find that individual preferences, such as altruism and fairness, can affect the decision and performance of the supply chain significantly. However, the previous widely adopted assumption contradicts the private, asymmetric, and diverse behaviors in reality. This paper considers a green supply chain with asymmetric heterogeneous preferences, in which the manufacturer does not know whether the behavioral type of the retailer is self-interest or altruistic. The optimal decisions on product greenness and pricing strategy of the supply chain under asymmetric heterogeneous preferences are obtained with a game analytic model of incomplete information. The impact of asymmetric preferences on product greenness, price, and supply chain performance is attained by comparing the results under symmetric and asymmetric scenarios. How heterogeneous preferences change the impact of asymmetric preferences is presented with sensitivity analysis. The case study illustrates and verifies the impact of asymmetric preferences, and its sensitivity with respect to heterogeneous preferences. The findings show that asymmetric preferences will reduce the product greenness and wholesale price decided by the manufacturer, will enhance the retail price decided by the self-interest retailer, and meanwhile reduce that decided by the altruistic retailer. Moreover, asymmetric preferences will decrease the manufacturer's profit, reduce the self-interest retailer's profit, and enhance the altruistic retailer's profit while reducing the altruistic retailer's utility. Their influence extents will increase in the heterogeneity of preferences with few exceptions in cases of the self-interest retailer's profit and the altruistic retailer's utility. The theoretical findings generate some managerial implications, by which for example it is necessary to adjust promptly the estimation about the behavior types of supply chain partners.

Under the wholesale price contract, we analyze the influence of the retailer’s fairness-concern information on the wholesale price, order quantity, the profit of each party and the supply chain in symmetry information (SI) condition and asymmetry information (AI) condition respectively. Then, we compute the value of retailer’s fairness-concern information to supplier, and we prove that the profit of all members and supply chain is decreasing with retailer’s fairness concern and the profit in SI condition is always higher than that in the AI condition. Then, we set the signaling game model to reveal the transmission mechanism of retailer’s fairness-concern information, and we analyze the potential separating equilibrium and pooling equilibrium existing in signaling model under asymmetric fairness-concern information. We prove that only when the signal transmission cost is different between retailers with different fairness-concern degree, the signaling model can effectively reveal the role and type of retailers. Finally, we provide some suggestions improve fairness-concern information transmission and optimize supply chain operation by discussing the condition of each separating equilibrium results.

The agricultural supply chain has to balance the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability. This paper investigates the green agricultural supply chain, consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer, who are both altruistic towards consumers. Such consumer-oriented altruism is different from the widely adopted enterprise-oriented altruism, which only measures the altruistic behaviors among supply chain enterprises. In the approach of game theory, the optimal operational decision is obtained, and thereby the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability are described rationally and attained, respectively. The impacts of consumer-oriented altruism on the sustainability of the green agricultural supply chain are analyzed and compared in a systematic way. A case study is carried out before drawing conclusions and managerial implications. The findings can be concluded as follows. Firstly, consumer-oriented altruism changes the operational performance of the green agricultural supply chain by enhancing the green level of agricultural products, cutting down the pricing decisions and marginal profit of each supply chain enterprise. Secondly, consumer-oriented altruism simultaneously facilitates each dimension of sustainability to different extents, and economic sustainability is promoted the most prominently, whereas environmental sustainability is improved the least. Thirdly, the retailer’s consumer-oriented altruism always improves each dimension of sustainability more than the manufacturer’s altruism does, and the advantage in the economic dimension is the most significant, while that in the environmental dimension is the smallest.

Carbon emission reduction has become a common hot topic around the world. Although the previous literature has proven that the asymmetric information and fairness concerns would influence the operational strategy for low‐carbon supply chain, it hardly touched the asymmetric information of fairness concerns, which contradicted practical observations and experimental evidence. Incorporating the asymmetric information of fairness concerns, this paper investigates a low‐carbon supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer with discrete types including selfish S‐type and fairness‐concerned F‐type. The manufacturer can observe and thereby know the behavioral type of the retailer in the scenario of symmetric information, while it cannot in the scenario of asymmetric information. In the approach of game theory, the optimal carbon emission reducing strategy and pricing strategy in the symmetric scenario and asymmetric scenario are achieved successively. By comparing the above two scenarios, the impacts stemming from the asymmetric information of fairness concerns at the individual level and systematic level are analyzed, respectively. A case study is offered before concluding some implications for the supply chain management. The findings include the following: Firstly, the asymmetric information of fairness concerns enhances the carbon emission reduction significantly. Although the fairness concerns alone decrease the carbon emission reduction, the asymmetric information increases with the dominating power. Secondly, the asymmetric information of fairness concerns raises the wholesale price and retail price dramatically. Although the impact of either fairness concerns or asymmetric information randomly changes with the behavioral type and information structure, their interactive impacts are stable and change smoothly. Thirdly, the asymmetric information of fairness concerns promotes a fairer profit distribution, while either fairness concerns or asymmetric information alone hardly changes the overall profit of the low‐carbon supply chain.

To enhance product greenness and operational performance, this study designs a Nash bargaining contract incorporating consumer environmental awareness in an agricultural supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer. The manufacturer invests in green technologies and the retailer shares partial green costs to improve greenness and efficiency. Using game theory, theoretical models for competitive scenario without Nash bargaining, local cooperative scenario with given ratio, and global cooperative scenario with Nash bargaining are constructed. Through comparison and sensitivity analysis, the enhancements from Nash bargaining are explored, and the effects of consumer environmental awareness on these enhancements are examined. The findings reveal several key insights. First, the process of bargaining determines the optimal contract ratio, which also depends on the magnitude of price sensitivity, marginal green costs, and consumer environmental awareness. Second, the Nash bargaining contract significantly improves product greenness, increases retail prices, and boosts profits for both the manufacturer and the retailer. Finally, consumer environmental awareness amplifies the effectiveness of the Nash bargaining contract, leading to greener products, higher prices, and greater overall supply chain profits. This research contributes to agricultural supply chain management by providing a theoretically rigorous Nash bargaining mechanism alongside a real-world case study, which harmonizes environmental stewardship and economic viability in agricultural supply chains. The findings offer actionable insights for supply chain managers and policymakers seeking to promote green innovation while maintaining profitability.