With the increase of public environmental awareness and the growth of e-commerce, sustainable development promotes the manufacturer to increasingly participate in green innovation and make full use of the online sales channel to enhance competitiveness. Despite decentralized encroachment being widely adopted in business reality, the current literature has commonly paid more attention to centralized encroachment. To complement related research, a dual-channel green supply chain composed of a manufacturer (its retail subsidiary) and a retailer is investigated. We focus on what encroachment strategy (centralization vs. decentralization) drives the green innovation and analyze the impact of consumer green awareness and product substitutability on the manufacturer’s encroachment strategy, green innovation efforts and supply chain performance. Under each encroachment strategy, we build a Stackelberg game model and derive the equilibrium outcome. Then, we theoretically analyze the effects of consumer green awareness and product substitutability on green innovation and each party’s profitability. Our comparative analysis shows what encroachment strategy drives green innovation and what encroachment strategy benefits both parties and social welfare. Numerical studies are also conducted to support the analytical results. Our key findings reveal that decentralization improves the green innovation and achieves a both-win situation for the manufacturer and the retailer. Besides that, decentralization can reduce the environmental damage and increase social welfare as well.
Identifying factors that influence the public's environmental quality perception is conducive to environmental protection and risk management. By employing data from the Chinese Social Survey (CGSS) and the ordinary least squares (OLS) method, the present study aims to explore the associations between Internet use and Chinese residents' environmental quality evaluation. The results show that, compared with non-netizens, netizens have a higher negative evaluation of environmental quality, which supports the negativity bias theory, namely, that netizens pay more attention to negative news related to environmental pollution on the Internet. Further study suggests that the impact of Internet use on environmental quality evaluation is heterogeneous across different categories of environmental issues and populations: Internet use has greater effects on risk perception of environmental issues that are closely related to residents' lives. In addition, Internet use has a greater negative impact on environmental quality evaluation for older people and rural residents. Finally, this paper utilizes a substitution variable method, propensity score matching (PSM) and quantile regression to conduct the robustness check.