Influence of creating an oligopoly through government intervention to improve partner collaboration intentions in the context of green supply chains

Pollution from supply chains can be controlled through the high level of efficiency realized by green supply chains. However, realizing a green supply chain depends on partners’ collaboration intentions. The purposes of this study are to explore the influence of oligopolies created through government intervention and how they can promote supply chain partners’ collaboration intentions in the context of green supply chains. Spearman’s correlation analysis, partial least squares, and the Sobel test are the main approaches adopted to evaluate the theoretical framework and hypotheses of this study. Our findings indicate that, in addition to a few leaders of the supply chain obtaining market order distribution authority, oligopolies created through government intervention guide consumers to more fully scrutinize these supply chain leaders and their partners. When their partners exhibit a lower collaboration intention in green supply chain improvement and increase the pollution emission risk, it is easy to induce and increase social pressure from consumers and thus pressure these leaders to reduce or even cancel the order distribution of these partners. To avoid order profit loss, these partners will continue to actively maintain their collaboration intentions in the green supply chain. In addition, environmental risk audits by supply chain leaders’ interventions are a common approach to improve green supply chains. However, partners are usually unwilling to cooperate with leaders’ audit interventions and show lower collaboration intentions. However, social pressure can threaten partners’ order profits and thus drive partners to show positive collaboration intentions and further accept leaders’ reasonable interventions in environmental risk audits and will have a positive effect on green supply chain improvement. Based on the above, to expedite the improvement of the green supply chain, oligopolies created through government intervention are not only an important external force but also an important national strategy in green environmental improvement.