Closed-loop supply chain models considering government subsidy and corporate social responsibility investment

Abstract

In addition to pursuing profits, more and more international enterprises are beginning to pay attention to environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR). How to effectively encourage enterprises to undertake more CSR and maintain the sustainable development of society has become an urgent task for managers and researchers. Under this background, this paper considers the recycling of used products for environmental sustainability and takes into account profit donation as a CSR investment. Aiming at the decision-making of single-cycle closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) with a dominant retailer when considering government subsidies and CSR investment, and based on the Stackelberg Game analysis technology, we formulate three distinct donation (CSR investment) models; the centralized system's donation model, the manufacturer's donation model, and the retailer's donation model, and by doing system comparisons and numerical examples to analyze the impact of government subsidy and CSR investment on new product pricing and waste product recovery from the perspectives of government, environment and CLSC system. The results show that government subsidy is not only conducive to expanding market demand and increasing waste recycling rates, but also to improving CSR investment levels. Under the two decentralized decision-making models, regardless of whether the dominant retailer makes CSR investment, she can always get more channel profits than the manufacturer. From the view of environmental, economic, and social perspectives, the manufacturer makes CSR investment a better choice, and at this time the government has the best effect of implementing subsidy. Finally, based on the principle of cost sharing, a CSR cost sharing contract which can realize the coordination of CLSC is designed to solve the channel conflict and optimize the decision-making. Counterintuitively, the dominant retailer can gain more profits when it bears more cost in the CSR cost sharing contract.