关键词: 过度自信, 低碳供应链, 信息分享, 碳减排, 碳交易

Abstract: To control carbon emissions and incentivize emission reduction among businesses, China officially implemented the “Administrative Measures for Carbon Emissions Trading (Trial Implementation)” in February 2021. The carbon cap-and-trade policy directly affects firms’ costs, profit composition, and operational decisions, standing as one of the most effective policy tools for emission reduction. Simultaneously, growing consumer awareness of low-carbon practices is leading to increased emphasis on products’ low-carbon attributes. Retailers actively engage in low-carbon marketing to highlight their products’ low-carbon attributes. Furthermore, information on market demand, costs, and quality significantly influences supply chain decisions. Companies often base their choices to share proprietary information on self-interest. Asymmetric cost information is a typical example of this phenomenon. Retailers possess proprietary information regarding their promotional costs, and whether they choose to share this information with manufacturers affects decision-making and utility throughout the supply chain. Moreover, market demand is typically uncertain, and cognitive biases can influence decision-makers’ judgment of market demand, thus affecting their decisions. Research indicates that overconfidence is one of the most prevalent cognitive biases. Decision-makers tend to exhibit overconfidence when faced with external uncertainty. This not only affects their own operational decisions but also influences other supply chain members. The retailer is prone to over-precision in judging consumers’ low-carbon awareness. Additionally, since the retailer’s low-carbon promotional costs are often private, the manufacturer may develop an overconfident bias in its assessment of these costs if the information is not shared.
Therefore, this study investigates the game-theoretic problem of emission reduction and promotion in a low-carbon supply chain incorporating overconfidence and information asymmetry. We model a supply chain with a single manufacturer and a single retailer under a carbon cap-and-trade policy. The model incorporates the following key features: the retailer, as the supply chain leader, is overconfident about consumers’ low-carbon awareness and holds private information on its promotional costs; the manufacturer, in turn, may become overconfident about these costs when information is asymmetric. We develop Stackelberg game models for three scenarios: (1)the retailer shares cost information; (2)the retailer hides cost information, and the manufacturer remains rational; and(3)the retailer hides cost information, and the manufacturer is overconfident. We analyze the equilibrium outcomes of the emission-reduction and promotion game, the retailer’s information sharing strategy, and the impacts of overconfidence and carbon trading price on decision-making and firm profits.
The results show that: (1)Both the retailer’s order quantity and the manufacturer’s unit product emission reduction are negatively correlated with the manufacturer’s overconfidence level; the more overconfident the retailer is, the higher (lower) the order quantity of low-margin (high-margin) products. (2)The retailer’s overconfidence only affects its belief-expected profit, whereas the manufacturer’s overconfidence affects both firms; the retailer always benefits from its own overconfidence, while the manufacturer always suffers from its overconfidence under information asymmetry. (3)The retailer’s decision to share (conceal) promotional cost information is not always beneficial to the manufacturer (retailer); this strategy depends on its profitability and promotional efficiency.
Future studies could introduce competition among manufacturers or retailers and explore the problem within more complex supply chain structures. The research framework could also be extended from a single carbon cap-and-trade policy to consider multiple carbon policies.

Key words: overconfidence, low-carbon supply chain, information sharing, carbon emission reduction, cap-and-trade