A Review of Sustainable Supply Chain Management Based on Game Theory

More and more attention has been paid to the sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) by scholars and practitioners since it concerns about both the social and environmental benefits of supply chain. Meanwhile, game analysis has proven to be an effective research method in SSCM research. This research reviews related domestic and foreign literature published in famous academic journals from 2001 to 2013 via applying content analysis method which is based on three analysis dimensions (performance objective, game element and coordination mechanism). By analyzing existing related papers on each dimension respectively, it is concluded that only few papers concerned about social benefit, demand uncertainty and information asymmetry. Considering these three dimensions synthetically, it can be summarized that a large proportion of researchers did not go deep enough into the study of complicated supply network and coordination in the field of SSCM based on the game theory. This review illustrates the current research situation and makes some suggestions for future further researches.