Green Supply Chain Operations Decision and Government Subsidy Strategies under R & D Failure Risk

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper covers an interesting topic. However, there are some caveats that need to be addressed before it is ready to be published. 

My first concern is about the contribution. Authors need to explicitly mention what the contribution of the paper is. This is, why is important that we know what authors are modeling. Mainly, because it is a theoretical paper that would be hard to model with data. For example, measuring R&D upgrade as successful or failure would be really hard if not impossible. Defining low or high investment or costs is also hard to measure.

My other concern is about some concepts that are not defined appropriately. Among the most important are the differences between government subsidizing manufacturers' R&D costs or production costs. Also a potential subtraction effect in government subsidies. The cost efficiency K also needs a deeper explanation.

The literature review is very basic and contributes very little to the understanding of the topic. It is not sufficient to mention previous studies. Authors need to explain what were the variables, the findings and limitations of those studies. Moreover, authors should mention if their contribution is similar or solves the limitations of previous studies.

Conclusions also need to be improved. What are the policy implications of the findings? What is "low or high R&D cost" ? Green technologies and products cover a lot of industries and the magnitude of the cost and investment varies a lot.

A minor comment is that the majority of the references are not in brackets.

Hope my comments are useful to improve the paper.

Author Response

Please refer to the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The review can be found in the attached files.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer，

Thank you very much for your affirmation of the selected topic and the content of the paper.

Sincerely,

Ruizhen Zhang on behalf of the authors.

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is topical and would be of interest to a broad audience of readers from the market development studies and other fields of sciences, as well as practicians. This paper considers a supply chain composed of manufacturers and retailers of green products and analyzes the optimal operation decision of the green supply chain under the two modes of government subsidizing manufacturers' R&D costs and subsidizing production costs of green products. 

 The author(s) put a lot of effort in aligning a amount of issue-specific literature sources (21 sources of literature  - please complete with European and American literature) into an original comprehensive discussion of optimal scientific depth and length to precisely elucidate the behavior of enterprises upgrading green technology. This study examines which subsidy method can maximize social welfare. The results show that, when the production cost of green products developed by manufacturers is high, if the government budget is low, the production cost of green products shall be subsidized; if the government budget is high, the manufacturer's R&D cost should be judged. If the R&D cost is high, the production cost of green products should be subsidized to encourage retailers to order more green products. However, if the R&D cost is low, the R&D cost of green products should be subsidized to encourage manufacturers to invest the most in R&D. 

 The article is written very professionally both from the scientific (reasoning, grounding, depth of discussion, etc.) and technical points (perfect English, well and logical structure, informative visualization, etc.) of view. The article is a good contribution to the body of knowledge in the field of  a supply chain of green products.

Please define precisely the purpose of the article and describe the conclusions in more detail.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please refer to the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

 This manuscript studies the optimal decision-making and profit of the supply chain of a manufacturer who develops and upgrades green products, with the probability of R & D failure, under different subsidy policies of the government. Through comparative analysis, it can be concluded which government subsidy method can obtain higher benefits under different cases. The whole manuscript is well structured and smoothly expressed. However, there are still some problems as follows:

    1.Abstract:

(1) Limitations of previous studies are not specified.

(2) The presentation of the conclusion should be further summarized to make it more coherent.

(3) The management enlightenment or research enlightenment is not written.

(4) The key words "R&D failure probability" and "social welfare" are not reflected in the abstract.

    2. Introduction Section:

(1) A cross-sectional comparison of domestic and international research on such issues is lacking.

(2) What is the innovation of this manuscript?

(3) It is recommended that the arrangement of the remaining sections be stated at the end.

 3. Literature review Section:

This section only briefly lists and summarizes the different literature, but lacks a broad and deep critical literature review. In addition, some recent literature in the supply chain area is missing.

e.g.,

Gawusu, S., Zhang, X., Jamatutu, S. A., Ahmed, A., Amadu, A. A., & Djam Miensah, E. (2022). The dynamics of green supply chain management within the framework of renewable energy. International Journal of Energy Research, 46(2), 684-711.

Lerman, L. V., Benitez, G. B., Müller, J. M., de Sousa, P. R., & Frank, A. G. (2022). Smart green supply chain management: a configurational approach to enhance green performance through digital transformation. Supply Chain Management: An International Journal, 27(7), 147-176.

Pal, B., Sarkar, A., & Sarkar, B. (2023). Optimal decisions in a dual-channel competitive green supply chain management under promotional effort. Expert Systems with Applications, 211, 118315.

Zheng, H., Li, X., Zhu, X., Huang, Y., Liu, Z., Liu, Y., ... & Li, C. (2022). Impact of Recycler Information Sharing on Supply Chain Performance of Construction and Demolition Waste Resource Utilization. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(7), 3878.
etc.
 4. Model Section:

(1) The hypothesis is incomplete and no assumptions are made about the rationality of the participants.

(2) Is there a meaning to the first sentence of the third paragraph of this section? This variable is also not reflected in what follows.

(3) In the model, the probability of R&D success is set to 'e' and the manufacturer's level of R&D effort is also set to 'e' - are the two 'e's the same? What is the rationale for this setting?

(4) It is recommended that the meaning of the different symbols in the model be presented in a table format.

 5. Numerical analysis Section:

In the simulation analysis, the parameters are assigned without any specified basis.

 6. There is no Discussion section in this manuscript, and there is a lack of comparison and discussion with similar studies.

 7. Conclusion:

It is recommended that the conclusions be described in as many points as possible.

To sum up, it is suggested that the authors carefully revise this manuscript according to the above suggestions. I sincerely look forward to receiving the revised version.

Author Response

Please refer to the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

No more comments

Reviewer 4 Report

I very much appreciate the time and care you took to respond to my review. I believe it is reasonable to publish the paper 'as-is' now.