Search Results (49)

Within the framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the transition toward green and low-carbon development has achieved broad international consensus. Blockchain technology offers an effective instrument for surmounting the trust bottleneck in low-carbon products; however, its substantial costs and market uncertainty constrain firm adoption. By developing a decision model for blockchain traceability investment and pricing of low-carbon products under various combinations of manufacturer risk preferences and government subsidies in a dual-channel supply chain, this study investigates the composite mechanisms through which government subsidies, channel structure, and risk aversion preferences jointly shape traceability investment and pricing decisions. The principal findings are as follows. The manufacturer’s traceability investment is synergistically promoted by consumer trust and the direct channel proportion through a “market pull–channel push” mechanism, yet is suppressed by risk aversion; furthermore, excessive risk aversion attenuates the incentive effect of consumer trust. The optimal design of government subsidies must be calibrated to the direct-channel share and risk preference characteristics, with higher subsidies warranted under “low direct-channel share–high risk aversion” conditions. Bilateral risk aversion intensifies the conservative strategic orientation across the supply chain, necessitating adaptive adjustments to subsidy levels by the government. This study furnishes theoretical underpinnings for corporate decision-making regarding blockchain traceability investments in low-carbon products and for the design of differentiated government subsidy schemes, thereby holding positive implications for advancing digital technology deployment in low-carbon product supply chains and fostering sustainable consumption. Full article

Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) represents a novel mode of transportation emerging within the low-altitude economy framework, exhibiting extensive development prospects. As a widely adopted incentive policy, government subsidy constitutes a crucial method for supporting the development of this strategic emerging industry. This paper constructs a differential game model of a supply chain composed of a manufacturer and retailer capable of simultaneously producing and selling eVTOL, considering three scenarios: centralized decision-making and decentralized decision-making with or without cost-sharing. Based on optimal control and differential game theory, the decision-making processes of supply chain members are investigated, and equilibrium strategies under different scenarios are compared and analyzed, with the model’s validity confirmed through numerical simulations. The findings indicate that the subsidy policy exerts a positive impact on the eVTOL supply chain: as the subsidy rates increase, supply chain members are better resourced to invest in endurance and marketing, thereby fostering eVTOL development. Concurrently, a reduction in wholesale and retail prices is observed, rendering eVTOL more affordable and of higher quality for consumers. The competitive structure of the upstream market does not alter this fundamental conclusion. The optimal endurance effort, marketing effort, eVTOL brand goodwill, and demand under the centralized decision-making model are higher than those under the decentralized one. In a certain feasible region, the two-way cost-sharing contract enables the eVTOL supply chain to achieve Pareto improvement, but it does not reach the level of centralized decision-making. This research expands the application of differential game theory in the field of the low-altitude economy, providing a scientific basis for the government to formulate policies and enterprises to distribute products. Full article

This paper investigates platform promotional subsidy strategies under price regulation. We construct a dynamic game model of incomplete information. The model involves a regulator, a monopoly platform, and heterogeneous consumers. The regulator sets a subsidy cap. The platform chooses the price and subsidy after observing its cost type. Consumers decide whether to purchase based on their valuation and the perceived subsidy value. We solve the game by backward induction. We characterize the perfect Bayesian equilibria. We derive closed-form solutions for the critical subsidy threshold, separating/self-selection equilibrium conditions, and optimal regulatory policies. The analysis yields three main findings. First, the sign of the net social benefit of the promotional subsidy determines the optimal policy. A positive sign calls for a high subsidy cap. This induces full market coverage. A negative sign calls for a ban on subsidies. Second, when the subsidy cap lies between the two platform types’ critical thresholds, a natural separating/self-selection equilibrium emerges. It operates at no cost. The feasible interval widens linearly in the cost gap. Third, diseconomies of scale have a stronger marginal effect on the critical subsidy than marginal cost. There exists an endogenously determined critical proportion of high-value consumers, which depends on the model parameters, such as $v_H,v_L,c_I,{\eta }_I$. This proportion divides the policy space into two regimes. These results provide a basis for low-cost information screening and differentiated regulation. Full article

There is a large and rapidly growing stock of retired power batteries from new energy vehicles in China. Unregulated informal recycling and improper disposal of these waste batteries trigger serious environmental hazards. Though a batch of regulatory policies on battery recycling have been released in recent years, the power battery recycling sector still faces prominent governance bottlenecks, especially ambiguous responsibility division and poor implementability under the entrusted recycling mode. To fill the existing research gap regarding tripartite interest conflicts and pricing mechanisms in entrusted recycling, this paper constructs a three-party evolutionary game model covering power battery producers, recyclers and government regulators. Two pricing models are further developed to distinguish producer self-operated recycling and third-party entrusted recycling channels. Numerical simulation is adopted to investigate multi-stakeholder interest contradictions, dynamic evolutionary trajectories and equilibrium stability of the recycling system, and the influences of subsidy intensity, supervision intensity and recycling cost on participants’ strategic choices are quantitatively analyzed. The research results demonstrate that inadequate government supervision and insufficient economic returns for formal recyclers serve as the primary obstacles hindering the effective deployment of entrusted recycling. An inherent and reasonable price gap exists between self-operated and entrusted recycling modes. Essentially, the price differential of standardized entrusted recycling represents the profit margin conceded by producers to recyclers instead of direct financial subsidies. To solve existing industry problems, this study proposes targeted recommendations for tripartite collaboration. The government should refine the regulatory framework of Extended Producer Responsibility and adopt differentiated reward and penalty mechanisms. Producers are expected to standardize entrusted recycling management and formulate a scientific pricing range for retired batteries. Recyclers ought to advance recycling technologies and maintain standardized operations. Collective efforts from all stakeholders can facilitate the long-term sustainability of the closed-loop recycling system for retired power batteries. Full article

Taking Lankao County as a case study, this study extends the established StrawFeed framework by linking NHPI-derived harvest dates to spatially differentiated straw release and seasonal equipment scheduling. Time-series Sentinel-2 observations were used to characterize harvest timing, while observed road routes were used to calibrate the detour parameter. The mapped harvest progression was compared with reported aggregate harvest progress and provided spatially differentiated timing inputs for logistics simulation. The results demonstrate that: (1) The spatial-economic framework effectively refine the spatial representation of traditional models in complex fragmented plots. (2) Under the annual shared-fleet baseline, the simulated delivered cost was 28.40 USD t⁻¹. (3) Route calibration yielded a road-detour coefficient of 1.36, demonstrating the effect of road geometry on transport distance. The simulated cost represents the result under the specified demand, road, equipment, and price assumptions rather than a causal penalty attributable to land fragmentation. Consequently, we suggest that land management policies should shift toward “precision-targeted” subsidies, and rural spatial planning should prioritize the layout of decentralized pre-processing hubs to optimize spatial logistics efficiency and economic viability. Full article

Electric vehicle (EV) remanufacturing is critical to circular economy development. However, consumers suffer from battery-induced range anxiety, limited transferable factory warranties for pre-owned EVs, and low trust in remanufactured components due to unstandardized aftermarket supervision. To mitigate these quality concerns, secondhand EV retailers have adopted a full original-price refund guarantee. While existing studies primarily focus on subsidies, carbon policies, and quality disclosure, few explore refund guarantee mechanisms in EV remanufacturing, especially their threshold effects and interactions with pure and hybrid component sourcing strategies. This study addresses this gap by establishing six game-theoretic models and deriving market equilibria via backward induction. We systematically analyze how failure rates, procurement costs, consumer-perceived quality, and guarantee strength affect market performance, optimal sourcing strategies, and social welfare, with numerical simulations validating our theoretical results. The findings reveal a universal threshold effect: refund guarantees boost sales only beyond a critical strength level, whereas weak guarantees fail to cover compensation costs and may even reduce social welfare. In particular, refund guarantees significantly improve social welfare under pure-remanufactured sourcing. This work offers actionable insights for remanufacturers, consumers, and regulators. Firms can optimize guarantee efficiency by simplifying claim processes, while policymakers can implement differentiated warranty regulations and tiered incentives. Full article

Understanding and managing the electric vehicle (EV) charging network is expected to become a major challenge for future electricity grids, driven by the growing penetration of battery electric vehicles. This study analyzes two real-world datasets from the Czech Republic, representing public and workplace charging sessions, each further categorized into AC and DC charging, with a focus on their key operational differences. Workplace charging is characterized by significantly longer session durations, higher energy delivered per session compared to public charging, and a distinct peak in energy use on Mondays. In contrast, public charging sessions peak on Fridays. Cross-country comparisons highlight substantial differences in charging behavior, driven primarily by local charging infrastructure conditions and EV fleet composition. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth analysis comparing public and workplace charging based on real-world data from charging stations. The scientific novelty of the study lies in showing that charging-session parameters are shaped not only by charging location and AC/DC technology, but also by battery electric vehicle (BEV)/plugin-hybrid-electric-vehicle (PHEV) fleet composition and provider-specific pricing strategies, including overstay-fee policies. The findings suggest that EU- and national-level policies and subsidy schemes should consider not only the total number and installed power of charging points, but also the composition of the charging mix, including workplace charging and different forms of public charging such as on-street AC, commercial charging, and high-power DC charging. Such differentiation is particularly important for smart grid integration, demand flexibility, and the development of grid-compatible charging infrastructure. Full article

This study examines the impact of Japan’s energy policy on sustainable economic growth from 2005 to 2025. The analysis involved adding carbon externalities to a DSGE model to evaluate the effects of a carbon tax, a renewable energy subsidy, and energy-efficiency improvements. All policies are uniformly assessed within a unified, dynamic, micro-founded macroeconomic model that links energy use and emissions. According to the empirical findings, the carbon tax is the most effective policy for reducing emissions (6.8%). Nonetheless, this improvement incurs economic costs, as output and welfare fall by 0.85% and 0.35%, respectively. Renewable energy subsidies have no unbalanced effect. They reduce emissions by 3.2%. However, they support output by 0.42% and welfare by 0.28%. It occurs through substitution and investment effects. The most prominent outcomes of energy-efficient design are 1.2% increase in output, 0.75% increase in welfare, and 2.5% decrease in emissions. It also indicates the degree of decoupling. The carbon price is vital to achieving decarbonization; however, policies that support improved energy efficiency and clean energy could be accompanied by differential pricing. Findings indicate that a coordinated policy mix would be most effective for Japan in meeting emissions targets without harming growth or improving welfare. Full article

With the rise in social channels, branders have gained more sales opportunities, but at the same time, they have to face practical challenges such as channel introductions, product configuration, and product pricing. Although existing studies have discussed branders’ product configuration, most of them confine product differentiation strategies to homogeneous e-commerce platforms, overlook the heterogeneity between traditional and social platforms, and rarely consider the impact of consumption subsidies. To this end, we consider a supply chain consisting of a brander and two heterogeneous e-commerce platforms. By incorporating both single and differentiated-product configurations, we developed a sequential Stackelberg game model to analyze the brander’s optimal channel introduction, product configuration, and pricing strategies under government consumption subsidies. Under the model settings and assumptions of this paper, we derive the following findings: (1) when the quality of the general product is relatively high, the brander achieves higher profits after introducing social channels; (2) when the commission rate is high and the quality of the high-level product falls within a specific threshold, the brander achieves the maximum profit under the single-product strategy; (3) when the proportion of fans is high, the profit of the social platform is higher than that of the traditional platform; (4) when the quality of high-level products is relatively low, the platform supply chain can achieve Pareto optimality by adopting the single-product configuration. This paper elucidates the strategic roles of product configuration and consumption subsidies in the context of social channel introduction, thereby providing a theoretical basis for branders’ operational decisions and for the government’s formulation of consumption subsidy policies. Full article

The high-value utilization of construction and demolition waste is critical for sustainable development in the building sector. However, in construction and demolition waste (CDW) recycling supply chains, existing studies lack a systematic analysis of pricing mechanisms for such recycled CDW as substrate products, particularly regarding interest coordination and the quantification of green value. To reveal the bargaining mechanism between farmers as recyclers and processors and supermarkets as retailers under an asymmetric bargaining structure, this study applies Nash bargaining theory to construct a dynamic game model. The study revealed that (1) when the green degree of a product reaches a certain level, it can obtain a sustainable market premium and create a stable income space for both parties. (2) The relative strength of the bargaining power between the two sides significantly affects the impact of market base scale changes on profit distribution. When the bargaining power of the supermarket is lower than the threshold and the bargaining power of the farmers is higher than the threshold, the difference in profit between the farmers and the supermarket is negatively correlated with the market base scale of the CDW as a substrate. (3) The green sensitivity level of consumers affects the difference in profit of the main body with the government subsidy to farmers. This level is determined by the value of the green sensitivity coefficient of consumers and presents a differentiated adjustment effect in different value ranges, which in turn affects the transmission direction of government subsidies to profit distribution. (4) When the green sensitivity coefficient and the green communication intensity of farmers and the investment level are lower than the corresponding critical values, the difference in social welfare with or without subsidies is positively correlated with the amount of the subsidy. This study provides decision support for farmers and supermarkets in designing rational bargaining strategies and offers insights for improving coordination and sustainability in construction and demolition waste recycling supply chains. Full article

Electric vehicle(EV) diffusion exhibits nonlinear, path-dependent dynamics shaped by interacting economic, technological, and social constraints. This paper develops a unified hybrid systems framework that captures these complexities by integrating microfounded household choice, capacity-constrained firm behavior, local network spillovers, and multi-level policy intervention within a Filippov differential-inclusion structure. Households face heterogeneous preferences, liquidity limits, and network-mediated moral and informational influences; firms invest irreversibly under learning-by-doing and profitability thresholds; and national and local governments implement distinct financial and infrastructure policies subject to budget constraints. The resulting aggregate adoption dynamics feature endogenous switching, sliding modes at economic bottlenecks, network-amplified tipping, and hysteresis arising from irreversible investment. We establish conditions for the existence of Filippov solutions, derive network-dependent tipping thresholds, characterize sliding regimes at capacity and liquidity constraints, and show how network structure magnifies hysteresis and shapes the effectiveness of local versus national policy. Optimal-control analysis further demonstrates that national subsidies follow bang–bang patterns and that network-targeted local interventions minimize the fiscal cost of achieving regional tipping. Beyond theoretical characterization, the framework is structurally calibrated to match the order-of-magnitude effects reported in leading empirical and simulation-based studies, including network diffusion models, agent-based simulations, bass-type specifications, and fuel-price shock analyses. The hybrid formulation reproduces short-run percentage-point subsidy effects, long-run forecast dispersion under alternative network assumptions, and policy-induced equilibrium shifts observed in the applied literature while providing a unified geometric interpretation of these heterogeneous results through explicit basin boundaries and regime switching. The framework provides a complex systems perspective on sustainable mobility transitions and clarifies why identical national policies can generate asynchronous regional outcomes. These results offer theoretical foundations for designing coordinated, cost-effective, and network-aware EV transition strategies. Full article

Fresh agricultural products are highly perishable, and inadequate preservation leads to food loss and supply chain inefficiency, undermining sustainability. This study develops a continuous-time differential game model to analyze dynamic pricing and cold-chain investment decisions in a two-echelon fresh agricultural produce supply chain under government intervention. Two subsidy regimes are examined: one targeting suppliers’ cold-chain investments and another supporting the retailer based on sales volume. By explicitly modeling the dynamic evolution of product freshness, we analyze how subsidy intensity and allocation influence firms’ strategies, market outcomes, and social welfare over time. The results show that when initial freshness is low, firms consistently adopt a penetration pricing strategy and increase cold-chain investment irrespective of subsidy intensity. In contrast, when initial freshness is high, a critical subsidy threshold emerges: Below this threshold, firms employ skimming pricing and reduce investment, whereas above it, they switch to penetration pricing and raise investment. Under equal government expenditure, supplier subsidies achieve higher product freshness but raise retail prices, while retailer subsidies lower prices and stimulate demand, albeit with more modest freshness improvements. Welfare effects are non-linear: supplier subsidies are more effective at low intensities, whereas retailer subsidies become superior beyond a specific threshold. These findings provide actionable insights for designing sustainable, targeted subsidy policies in fresh agricultural supply chains. Full article

China possesses 400 million hectares of grasslands that provide regulating ecosystem services (ESs), including wind erosion control, water conservation, and carbon sequestration. The central government implemented the Grassland Ecological Protection Subsidy and Reward Policy (GERCP) in 2011, allocating 150 billion yuan (approximately $23 billion) through 2020, while national vegetation coverage increased from 51.0% in 2011 to 56.1% in 2020. Existing valuation studies emphasize total economic value but rarely quantify the concentration of ES values across space or their alignment with fiscal allocation. We compiled 734 grassland ES valuation observations from 186 studies published between 2000 and 2024, and estimated a multi-level mixed-effects meta-regression model for benefit transfer. We projected standardized county-level ES values, decomposed spatial inequality using the Gini coefficient and Theil index, and assessed the mismatch between value-informed allocation weights and observed GERCP transfers. Predicted values exhibit high concentration (Gini coefficient = 0.58), and between-zone differences explain 52% of total Theil inequality. The mismatch analysis identifies 94 high-value and low-compensation counties concentrated in southern Qinghai and northern Tibet, where per-hectare values are 180 to 240% above national medians, and compensation is 35 to 55% below the median. The results support value-informed targeting and redistribution of fiscal weights across regions, while payment levels require pricing benchmarks based on opportunity cost or conservation cost rather than total economic value. We propose calibrating compensation rates through a tiered schedule based on ESV quantiles or standardized ecosystem-service bundles, and implementing county-level differentiated payments with periodic updating tied to monitoring and evaluation. As a minimum viable step, we recommend piloting this scheme in counties with high ESV yet low current compensation, and integrating it into existing ecological compensation funding channels to reduce administrative frictions. Full article

The promotion of shore power is a key pathway for reducing port-related emissions and achieving sustainable maritime development. This study analyzes the strategic interactions among governments, ports, and shipping companies by constructing a tripartite evolutionary game model. Specifically, it addresses three core questions: (1) how stakeholders’ initial intentions and strategic choices influence the system’s evolutionary path and eventual equilibrium; (2) how critical parameters—including subsidies for shore power infrastructure, wind turbine installation, and ship retrofitting, as well as electricity price support, carbon pricing, and policy implementation costs—shape the dynamics of the system and the equilibrium strategies of the three parties; and (3) how heterogeneity in national energy mixes, particularly the roles of wind turbine, affects decision-making behaviors across different countries. Simulation experiments are conducted to explore the effects of varying policy interventions and energy conditions on the stability of cooperative strategies. The results provide insights into the design of differentiated policy instruments that promote shore power adoption while accounting for the structural characteristics of national energy systems. This research enriches the theoretical application of evolutionary game theory to maritime sustainability and offers practical guidance for governments and stakeholders in advancing decarbonization in the port and shipping sectors. Full article

This study investigates the drivers of green production practices among forest-cultivated ginseng growers in Jilin Province, China, by integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework. Based on survey data from 369 households in the major production regions of Tonghua, Baishan, and Yanbian areas, an Ordered Probit model and a Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM) algorithm are employed for cross-validation. The results indicate that growers’ cognitive traits (awareness of green production standards and ecological/quality safety) and willingness (acceptance of price premiums for green products) are the most stable and critical drivers. Policy incentives (e.g., certification subsidies and outreach) not only directly promote green practices but also exhibit synergistic effects through interactions with resource endowments and psychological cognition. Regional heterogeneity is evident: Tonghua shows policy–market co-drive, Baishan is dominated by ecological constraints and safeguard policies, while Yanbian relies more on education and individual resources. Accordingly, this study proposes a differentiated policy system based on diagnosis–intervention–evaluation to support the high-quality development of forest-cultivated ginseng industry and ecological-economic synergies. Full article