Pricing Strategy and Social Welfare in a Supply Chain With Different Rights Structure Under Carbon Tax Policy

Aiming at the pricing and emission reduction decision-making problem of a two-level supply chain consisting of multiple manufacturers and multiple retailers, this paper proposes a consistent pricing mechanism based on multi-agent structure to coordinate the supply chain, and the operation of supply chain participants from competition to cooperation. The proposed algorithm is distributed and collaborative, thus eliminating the need for a central snap-ins, central price coordinators, or leaders. Firstly, a two-level supply chain social welfare model with multi-agent structure is established, and the system nodes in this model are scalable. Then, the pricing and carbon tax policies of the supply chain under different dominant rights are discussed to determine the optimal transaction price and carbon tax policies in order to maximize social welfare. The research results show that the transaction price increases with the increase of the carbon tax rate, and the social welfare decreases with the increase of the carbon tax rate, so the government should formulate the carbon tax within a reasonable range. It is also found that the overall social welfare obtained when there is no dominant node is higher than the social welfare obtained when there is dominant node. It can guide the market to optimize the allocation of resources according to production needs, so as to achieve the maximum efficient use and social welfare.