Sustainability, pricing and marketing in a dual channel supply chain with different retailing scenarios and carbon emission reduction

In order to stimulate the customer's willingness to buy products in today's competitive supply chain, dualchannel selling, retailer's sale effort, quality improvement, and reducing carbon emission (cap-and-trade regulation and finance in new technologies) are used to address a wide range of customers. It should be noted that the high costs of employing these stimulating factors have a significant effect on pricing strategy and customer affordability. Therefore, in order to solve this problem, cost-sharing as a coordination contract is used to create harmony among the supply chain's members and game theoretical strategies are employed to find the economic and environmental equilibrium. Hence, in this research, we develop a dual-channel supply chain including one manufacturer and one retailer in which the products are sold to the customers by both retail and online channels. Demand for the bazaar depends on quality level, sustainability, retailer's sales efforts, and online and retail prices. The innovation of this study is using a cost-sharing contract to find an optimal approach to declining costs, as well as considering cap-and-trade regulation, investment in new technologies, decreasing carbon emissions, augmenting the sustainability of the products, quality level, retailer's sales efforts, and selling products by dual channel to increase the customer's willingness to buy. There should be an equilibrium between costs, investments, and consideration of sustainability. This study addresses this issue through the use of cost-sharing contract. Two scenarios for selling the products under a sharing contract are used to acquire the optimal intention variables using game theoretic methodologies including Nash and Stackelberg games. The results indicate that employing a cost-sharing contract under specific cost-sharing rates can coordinate the supply chain and boost his/her profit in both games.