This study investigate a multilevel supply chain subject to cap-and-trade regulation, involving a capital-constrained supplier, a manufacturer, and a retailer. Blockchain technology enhances trust among core firms, cross-level firms, and banks, thereby enabling financing for cross-level firms, and strengthening consumer trust in low-carbon products. This study explores the advance payment without blockchain technology (AN mode), and two blockchain-enabled financing modes: advance payment with cross-level financing (ACB mode) and advance payment with bank financing (ABB mode). First, both ABB and ACB modes reduce carbon emissions more than the AN mode, while which mode achieves greater total supply chain abatement depends on the bank interest rate and carbon abatement efficiency. Blockchain-enabled financing benefits all supply chain participants when blockchain operation costs are low, achieving win-win-win outcomes compared with the AN mode. These results remain robust even when carbon abatement efficiencies are heterogeneous. Second, when all supply chain participants adopt blockchain, an equilibrium emerges where the supplier, manufacturer, and retailer choose the same financing mode. Interestingly, when blockchain operation costs are low and carbon abatement efficiency is high, the ACB mode enables all participants to attain higher profits. Finally, when the supplier's initial capital and the retailer's interest rate are either low or high, the ACB mode is the supplier's optimal choice under blockchain technology. These findings provide managerial guidance for strategically selecting financing modes and adopting blockchain technology. The reliability of the conclusions is verified through sensitivity analyses.

This paper explores a low-carbon supply chain comprising a capital-constrained manufacturer and a retailer under cap-and-trade regulation. The manufacturer can obtain financing support for both production and carbon emission reduction through either Bank Financing (BF) mode or Mixed Financing (MF) modes. The incorporation of blockchain technology is posited to enhance the transparency of uncertain emission reduction data within the supply chain, allowing banks to adjust interest rates accordingly via smart contracts. Four modes are analyzed: BF without blockchain technology, BF with blockchain technology, MF without blockchain technology, and MF with blockchain technology. Under MF, the retailer provides financing support for production cost and the bank provides financing support for carbon emission reduction. The findings indicate that the utilization of blockchain technology improves supply chain profits when its cost is moderate. Without blockchain, BF mode will be chosen when faced with intermediate bank interest rate. Conversely, when the manufacturer employs blockchain technology, the strategic choices of both the manufacturer and retailer regarding the BF and MF modes are independent of the associated cost. Additionally, BF mode becomes more attractive when the trigger point for emission reduction output is moderate and the cost of adopting blockchain technology is minimal.

This study considers a low-carbon supply chain model comprised of a capital-constrained manufacturer and a retailer under a cap-and-trade system. These two parties can choose from two financing modes: bank financing or mixed financing, in which the latter combines bank financing with equity financing. Two decision-making power structures are formulated, namely the Nash game model and the retailer-led Stackelberg game model. Subsequently, a comparative analysis of equilibrium outcomes for both parties within these power structures is performed, yielding the following insights: (1) In the bank financing mode, retailers find greater profitability in adopting dominance. When emission reduction efficiency is high, manufacturers obtain more profit within a Nash game context. However, when emission reduction efficiency is low, manufacturers accrue more profit in a Stackelberg game context. In the mixed financing mode without cap-and-trade regulations, supply chain participants do not express a preference for any specific game structure. (2) Without cap-and-trade regulation, in both the Nash and Stackelberg game models, the supply chain participants find more profitability in mixed financing when carbon emission reduction efficiency is high. Meanwhile, bank financing proves more profitable when the carbon emission reduction is low. Moreover, this study investigates the impact of wholesale and retail prices of low-carbon products on the financing strategies of the supply chain participants under different power structures and financing modes. Additionally, extended models are considered, including the manufacturer-led Stackelberg game structure and the capital-constrained manufacturer with a certain amount of initial capital.

Moving manufacturing back to the USA has been in many fierce debates. While many believe that reshoring is beneficial to the USA through creating more jobs, our paper intends to gain more insights into this issue by studying a sourcing game between global firms and governments. Global firms may choose between offshoring and reshoring. Governments, as tax policymakers, aim at improving social welfare. First, our analysis indicates that firms may choose reshoring even if there are cost advantages to offshoring. Secondly, while reshoring may increase employment in the USA, it may also have a negative effect on the overall social welfare. Thirdly, when the labour cost in the USA is moderately higher, the government may launch new tax policies to motivate reshoring and improve social welfare. Finally, numerical examples demonstrate that reshoring improves social welfare in labour-intensive industry, while tax policies may curb such improvement with high tax rates.

After decades of outsourcing to low-cost countries, companies are restructuring their production footprint globally. Especially having experienced supply chain disruption caused by the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic for the past several years, many multinational companies are considering bringing their operations back home (i.e., reshoring). At the same time, the U.S. government proposes using tax penalties to motivate companies to reshore. In this paper, we study how a global supply chain adjusts its offshoring and reshoring production decisions under two different circumstances: (1) under traditional corporate tax regulations; (2) under the proposed tax penalty regulations. We analyze cost variants, tax structures, market access and production risks to identify conditions where global companies decide to bring manufacturing back to their domestic countries. Our results show that multinational companies would be more likely to relocate the production from the main foreign country to an alternative country that enjoys even lower production costs under the proposed tax penalty. As identified by our analysis and as well as numerical simulations, reshoring can only occur in rare situations such as when the production costs in the foreign countries are close to that in the domestic country. Besides potential national tax reform, we also discuss the impact of the Global Minimum Tax Rate proposed by the G7 on global companies' offshoring/reshoring decisions.

This study introduces the second-hand market into the famous ski-rental model, presents an online rental problem of durable equipment with a transaction cost, and designs an optimal deterministic competitive strategy. The traditional competitive analysis is based on the worst-case scenario; hence, its results are too conservative. Even though investors want to manage and control their risks in reality, in some cases, they are willing to undertake higher risk to obtain greater benefits. Considering this situation, this study designs a risk strategy combining the decision makers’ risk tolerance with certain and probabilistic forecasts. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed risk strategy can improve the competitive ratio. This study introduces the idea of risk compensation into traditional competitive analysis and designs strategies for online rental of durable equipment based on forecast. The decision maker selects a strategy according to risk tolerance and forecast. If the forecast is correct, then a reward is obtained; otherwise, the risk is guaranteed to be within the decision maker’s risk tolerance. The optimal restricted ratio, that is, the competitive ratio of a risk strategy, is less than the optimal competitive ratio of a deterministic strategy. Therefore, the performance of the proposed risk strategy is better than a deterministic strategy. At the same time, the risk strategy based on the probabilistic forecast represents an extension of the strategy based on a certain forecast. In other words, the risk strategy based on a certain forecast is a special case of the risk strategy based on the probabilistic forecast.

In this paper, a manufacturer is considered who is regulated by the cap-and-trade scheme and sells products on an e-business (EB) platform. When this manufacturer is capital-constrained, funds can be accessed via EB platform financing mode, supplier credit financing mode, and mixed financing mode, where the manufacturer accesses funds from both the supplier and the EB platform. Considering the exogenous retail price, this paper develops optimizing models under all three financing modes to investigate the manufacturer's emission reduction, production quantities, and financing strategies. The financing strategy of a slightly capital-constrained manufacturer depends on the usage fee charged by the EB platform. The manufacturer prefers non-financing support if the usage fee rate is too high; otherwise, the manufacturer prefers accessing funds from the EB platform. A moderately capital-constrained manufacturer prefers EB platform financing if the financing rate charged by the EB platform financing is slightly higher than that charged by the supplier. Also, a moderately capital-constrained manufacturer prefers EB platform financing if the usage fee rate is relatively low; otherwise, supplier credit financing is preferred. Furthermore, a heavily capital-constrained manufacturer prefers mixed financing if the financing rate charged by the EB platform is higher than that charged by the supplier; otherwise, the manufacturer prefers EB platform financing. When the usage fee is endogenous, the EB platform financing mode is better than the non-financing mode for both the capital-constrained manufacturer and the EB platform. Furthermore, the above conclusions are robust when the retail price is endogenous.

The reverse logistics of municipal hazardous waste (RLMHW) have received close attention from researchers and practitioners alike, given the essential impact of safe transportation and effective management of hazardous waste on public health and environmental sustainability. There are a great number of studies in the extant literature on RLMHW, with many and diverse research topics; however, a concise and complete overview of the research works already conducted in this particular area is conspicuous by its absence. This paper strives to fill the gap through the conduct of rigorous systematic literature review of RLMHW in the past three decades, and then establish a framework of studies on RLMHW. The main contributions of this study are as follows: (1) to identify the trend of journals publishing research papers on RLMHW; (2) to extract the main topics in studies on RLMHW; (3) to locate the most popular research areas of RLMHW; (4) to summarize the methods adopted in studies on RLMHW; (5) to identify research deficiencies in certain categories of RLMHW; and (6) to establish the future research directions of RLMHW. The main implications of the study are to offer a better understanding of RLMHW by systematic crystallization of archival data in a systematic chronological order across central issues. This study contributes to scholarly debate in this field by serving as a snapshot paper to document the development of the field and gives input to policymakers in process design and policy making in the domain of RLMHW.

This paper discusses the impact of a trade credit policy on alleviating conflicts arising on a dual-channel supply chain that includes one manufacturer and one value-added retailer. We use the Stackelberg game to model the problem and characterize optimal pricing strategies for each supply chain partner, examining different circumstances in terms of retail price and trade credit contracts. When a consistent price strategy is applied in the dual channels under conditions of an exogenous credit period, trade credit can help both partners to achieve win-win situations in the following circumstances: (1) when the retail channel's market share is small and the retailer's interest rate is high; or (2) when the retail channel's market share is large and the retailer's interest rate is lower than the manufacturer's. The study also concludes that when an inconsistent price strategy is applied, a trade credit contract can alleviate channel conflicts when the retailer's interest rate is higher than the manufacturer's. Otherwise, the partners may terminate cooperation. However, when the manufacturer has the power to determine and set the credit period, trade credit cannot alleviate channel conflicts under consistent price and inconsistent price scenarios.

In complex Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) application systems, there may exist a variety of functional sub-systems which provide divergent services to the users and the relationship among these services could be strong, which is evidently very common in practice. As one such IoT application, the smart city is designed to use intelligent services in an environment where transport, environment, energy, living, governance, and civic components are integrated to operate the city in a smart and efficient manner. Surprisingly, however, the current state-of-the-art on blockchain does not show the progress on diversified services of the complex IIoT applications. This paper tends to fill the gap and presents a scalable block graph platform and consensus protocol for the complex IIoT applications by adopting the limited resources of IIoT devices. The platform and consensus protocol are generic in the sense that they can support any practical service. The directed acyclic graph represents a significant exhibition in improving the scalability of blockchains and supports our proposed consensus protocol in substance; moreover, the detailed syntax of the block graph is defined. The consensus protocol is showed to be secure against disloyal voting, sybil attack, and 51% attack. The real use case of smart city demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposal.

The capacity-sharing strategy is a widely used strategy to alleviate the mismatch between supply and demand. To investigate the performance of the capacity-sharing strategy, we consider two firms competing for business in a single market in this paper. Both firms can choose to join the horizontal capacity-sharing strategy with a revenue-sharing contract. By comparing the equilibrium solutions of analytical models where firms share capacities and firms don’t share capacities respectively, we find that both firms raise their prices with a low revenue sharing rate when the total desired demand can be satisfied by the total capacities; But the change of prices depends on the combined effect of competition intensity and the revenue sharing rate if the capacity sharing can’t satisfy the total desired demand. In addition, we find that the profit of the firm with insufficient capacity increases if capacity sharing is present. However, the profit of the firm with underutilized capacity increases in the revenue sharing rate when it is small, but decreases in it when it becomes relatively large. Thus, capacity sharing is not always better for the firm with underutilized capacity.

For recent decades, China has been the clear choice for global companies to build manufacturing plants to supply the world due to its seemingly unlimited supply of low-cost labor, lower currency, and attractive government incentives. However, recent trends have showed that the U.S., with a resilient corporate sector, flexible skilled workforce, and potential stricter tax policies, is becoming more attractive as a place to manufacture many goods to consume on its own soil. This research studies the incentives, possibilities and benefits of reshoring from the perspective of the social welfare. First, our analysis indicates that firms may remain offshoring even if the government provides tax incentives. Secondly, reshoring may increase the employment in the home country, but it also has a negative effect on the domestic consumer surplus, and then impair the overall social welfare given the tax policy implemented by the government.

A fresh agricultural food online exchange system is gradually becoming an emerging e-business model in China. However, how and when to make an investment in this new business model is risky due to the unique characteristics of fresh agricultural food. In this paper, from a third party decision maker’s perspective, we propose an evolutionary discounted cash flow model to investigate the optimum time point for investment. Based on the assumptions of base demand, the derived e-demand occurring on the pendent e-business system can be characterized by non-stationary stochastic processes. Then our new model can further be innovatively analyzed by considering the dynamic scheme of the cash flow and its evolution. The analytical results suggest the optimal investment time point depends upon the consumers’ switch rate from the physical store to e-store and on the urbanization rate. A Monte Carlo simulation is further presented to compare the effects of multiple uncertainties embedded into the system. Our uncertainty analysis reveals that when government financial support fluctuates greatly, the optimal investment time could be either in the very beginning or in the end. This optimal time strategy also holds for the random demand factor after the coefficient variation of the demand reaches a certain threshold.

Over the past three decades, business managers and academic researchers have shown considerable interest in understanding how information systems (IS) can lead to competitive advantages for firms. Although in the United States researchers have found that IS competences lead to competitive advantages, it remains unknown whether firms working in emerging economies can capitalize on IS competence for competitive advantages. This article examines the moderating effect of the learning intensity of organizations on the relationship between IS competence and competitive advantages in 122 Chinese firms. Data were collected from a mailed survey of 122 information-technology (IT) managers. The results indicate that flexibility of IT infrastructure, IT business skills, and learning intensity have significant effects on competitive advantages. The learning intensity of organizations positively moderates the relationship between IS business skills and competitive advantages, but has no moderating effect on the relationship between the flexibility of IT infrastructure and competitive advantages.

Based on the resource‐based view (RBV) and the transaction cost economics (TCE) theories, we study the impact of IT capability on the performance of port supply chain using an IT‐enabled transaction cost frontier model where the IT capability is modeled as a unique production input and as an endogenous transaction attribute as well. By examining the optimal levels of IT capability for different port systems from the viewpoint of production cost and transaction cost, we find theoretical evidence to explain why a port system with a horizontal competitive governance mode is less successful at integrating a port IT system in practice. Moreover, we find that the optimal IT capability of an individual port operator is lower than the IT capability in an integrated heterogeneous system. We further investigate how to improve IT capability to the desired system level through different forms of an incentive system that includes a subsidy offered by the port authority to coordinate the entire port system. The fixed subsidy is found to be the most cost‐effective and the easiest to implement. In addition, considering that information about effort cost for IT capability can be private under a market or hybrid governance mode, we study the performance of a direct revelation mechanism when revealing the port operator's private information and true cost to the port authority.

With the overwhelming findings that systemic risk dominates idiosyncratic risk in individual firms along a supply chain or in an industrial sector, and noting the fact that supply chain literature so far has been firm-based, it is critical to analyse inter-firm transactions and related risks which have largely been omitted from current supply chain research. To advance along this critical dimension, we develop a transaction cost frontier model that allows inter-firm transaction facilities in terms of a port-focal supply chain modelling framework. The key findings are as follows. (1) Environment heterogeneity is a characteristic transaction attribute, and logistics efficiency is critically dependent on both intra-firm asset specificity (Williamson, 2002) and inter-firm environment heterogeneity when ports are considered as transaction facilities. Port logistics demonstrates that horizontal integration (as opposed to vertical integration) becomes more cost effective as environment heterogeneity increases, given the same degree of asset specificity among individual ports. (2) An adaptive advantage (eg, transaction efficiency) is identified and characterized through the port-focal industrialization of supply chains, and is found to be an explanatory cause for the geographically concentrated horizontal specialization and differentiation, as increasingly observed in practice. Logistics industrialization will bring about the growth of port-focal urbanization.

The emerging automatic data-capturing technology, radio frequency identification technology (RFID), has been extensively adopted in logistics process and retail operations. However, limited research has been conducted on how to exploit and integrate RFID-enabled timely demand information into production processes. The lack of sufficient evaluation on the financial benefits of RFID hinders the adoption of this technology in production processes. In this study, we propose a framework to integrate RFID-enabled timely demand information into a dynamic production lot-sizing problem. Our results show that manufacturers, distributors and retailers can benefit from the availability of timely demand information via RFID. Our research sheds new light on understanding the financial value of RFID in a production process, and fills a gap in the application of RFID along the supply chain.

A multinational company may move production to a foreign country to take advantage of low manufacturing cost, and/or experience tax savings. Transfer prices play an important and strategic role on income shifting by multinational companies. In this paper, we construct a framework for optimal decision making in global supply chains with uncertain and price-dependent demand, propose methods to improve global supply chain parties’ performance, and explore schemes to integrate global supply chains. The optimal pricing and offshoring decisions are investigated for different situations where the low foreign production cost and low foreign tax rate exist or only one of them is available. The case of low foreign tax rate without the advantage of low foreign production cost provides the most interesting findings that partial offshoring dominates when a certain threshold is met. In addition, the double marginalization is examined in decentralized global supply chains similar to the mechanism in newsvendor problems. Due to the existence of the tax jurisdiction, the double marginalization cannot be completely eliminated by coordinating schemes. Finally, the traditional buy back contract is found to be unable to coordinate global supply chains, while a modified sales sharing contract can improve the performance of the global supply chain.

In password-based or two-factor password and smart card authentications, password changing is one of common techniques used to improve the security of the systems protected by the password. However, the password-changing operations in existing password authentications either depend on the login phase or violate the common practice that an old password should not be valid for subsequent login after being updated. On the other hand, password mistyping is very common in reality, which may be random or be skewed by the adversary via technical means or social engineering manipulation [i.e., a kind of denial-of-service DoS attack]. In human-centric authentication mechanisms, password changing and DoS resilience are not marginal issues. The paper addresses the requirements of robust password changing in authentication and presents SPCA, a password authentication scheme with robust password changing, DoS resilience, and card-compromise security. Thus, the proposal can be viewed as a suitable candidate instantiation for authentication services of human-centric security, by embedding in the computer and software systems. SPCA also achieves other appealing features, such as self-healing ability and strong privacy protection, which may be useful for human-centric applications. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.