关键词: 碳交易路径, 碳配额, 碳减排, 零售商主导, Stackelberg博弈

Abstract: Environmental sustainability affects people’s lives and business operations. As countries in Europe and the United States have developed environmental protection plans and achieved good results, China opened its carbon emission trading market in 2013, and formulated relevant carbon emission trading policies. The carbon emission trading market enables smaller enterprises to obtain more carbon allowances, and larger enterprises to trade among their subsidiaries, that is, there are two carbon trading paths—external carbon trading path and internal carbon trading path. Under different trading paths, carbon quotas affect the emission reduction decisions of enterprises, and the emission reduction decisions of enterprises and the internal and external carbon trading prices will have an impact on the final profits of enterprises.
Based on this background, the possibility of an internal carbon trading market is considered. By constructing the Stackelberg model under three scenarios in which only external carbon trading market exists in the retailer-led supply chain, manufacturers conduct internal and external carbon trading, and retailers conduct internal carbon trading and external carbon trading, the impact of external carbon trading price on corporate carbon emission reduction and corporate profits in the three scenarios is analyzed respectively. The carbon emission reduction and corporate profits of the three cases are compared and analyzed.Finally, Matlab and Mathematica are used to visually analyze the model to assist the presentation of conclusions. The numerical analysis data were taken from the commonly used data in papers in this field.
The research shows that the internal carbon trading market is beneficial to the carbon emission reduction and profits of supply chain enterprises. When there is only an external carbon trading market, the carbon emission reduction of enterprises decreases with the increase of the external carbon trading price, and the carbon emission reduction effect is affected by the external carbon trading market. When internal and external carbon trading prices coexist, the free transfer of carbon allowances by retailers will reduce the wholesale profits of manufacturers. Setting internal trading prices within a certain range is conducive to reducing the carbon emission reduction of enterprises in the supply chain and improving the overall profits of the supply chain, which will exceed the overall profits of the supply chain when only external carbon trading markets exist. When the carbon emission reduction difficulty of leading supply chain enterprises is less, it is conducive to helping non-leading enterprises to obtain more profits and improve the overall carbon emission reduction level of the supply chain.
This paper makes an in-depth study of the supply chain carbon emission reduction decision-making problem of “retailer-led-manufacturer-followed decision”, and analyzes the effects of internal carbon trading price, external carbon trading price and carbon emission reduction cost on carbon emission reduction and profits of supply chain members. However, the research still needs to be strengthened in the practical application level: in the actual “production-marketing” link of the supply chain, the quantity of products sold by retailers in different sales stages often deviates from the quantity of products ordered. In addition, the internal carbon trading price is also affected by multiple factors such as government policy orientation and consumers’ preference for low-carbon consumption. In view of this, future research should focus on how retailers should make reasonable carbon emission reduction decisions under the influence of multiple factors such as government policies and consumers’ low-carbon preferences, which will provide an important reference for enterprises to develop more realistic carbon emission reduction strategies.

Key words: carbon trading path, carbon quota trading, carbon reduction, retailer-led, Stackelberg game