Carbon tax or cap-and-trade: Which is more viable for Chinese remanufacturing industry?

The debate between cap-and-trade and carbon tax, two major carbon emission reduction mechanisms to deal with global warming, has been going on for years unsettled. The strategy to implement one of them or both is by far mainly addressed at the national level, and there is a need to customize the policy-making for different sectors, especially the emerging remanufacturing industry that has the great potential to reduce material and energy consumptions. Based on a closed-loop supply chain model, this study analyzes the tradeoffs between carbon tax and cap-and-trade with a series of numerical studies. While keeping carbon emissions under control, cap-and-trade demonstrates a better fit to remanufacturing: its performances on manufacturer profit, social welfare, and consumer surplus surpass carbon tax’ in nine, eight, and six out of nine groups respectively. Only when the carbon quota level is too high, the cap-and-trade is possible to lose. In addition, this study examines two government-to-enterprise-subsidy strategies, direct subsidy and policy bias, and find both helpful but almost no difference in their impacts. The findings yield useful insights into the industry-wise design of carbon emission reduction mechanisms for remanufacturing and similar sectors

Virtual Collaboration with Mobile Social Media in Multiple-Organization Projects

This study investigates the use of mobile social media as emerging collaboration tools by virtual teams. Based on the construal level theory, it develops a research model hypothesizes that collaboration tool effectiveness influence contextual performance and task performance through the mediation of procedure agreeability. In addition, geographic dispersion, team size and project duration serve as moderators as they reflect virtual collaboration complexity. Empirical findings support most hypothesized relationships. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Flexible versus simple trade-in strategy for remanufacturing

Some enterprises recently start to offer the flexible trade-in option to attract customers from competitors, in contrast to the simple one that only allows them to return used products to the same manufacturers for new. Based on analytical and numerical analyses, this study compares the environmental impacts of two trade-in strategies (simple versus flexible) in combination with different carbon tax policies. From the perspective of consumer switching behaviour, a Hotelling model with two market segments is established. Under the flexible trade-in strategy, the carbon emission of enterprises turns out to be significantly higher than that under the simple trade-in strategy. An appropriate carbon tax policy, especially with preferential tax rates on green products, is capable of guiding enterprises to choose a more environment-friendly trade-in strategy included in the model. The findings fill the research gap in comparing the pros and cons of simple and flexible trade-in strategies in terms of sustainable development, and provide managers and policy-makers the insights on how to promote the healthy development of the remanufacturing industry with trade-in strategizing and carbon taxation

Sharing economy of electric vehicle private charge posts

The increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) leads to heightened demand for the charging infrastructure. More and more EV drivers install private charge posts, which can now be shared with others through certain mobile apps. This emerging phenomenon is becoming a prominent part of the sharing economy. To examine the impacts of post sharing on EV charging market, this study establishes game theory models on consumer choices among private, public, and shared options. Such peer-to-peer sharing and collaborative consumption redistribute the installation and operation costs of private charge posts in proportion to their increased utilization. Numerical analyses suggest that the sharing mode provides a win-win solution for charge post owners and non-owner consumers, as well as electricity distributors and public charging infrastructure operators. In the case of China, the estimated saving for charge post owners is between 20% and 50%, which can be translated into more non-government investment in the EV industry chain. The findings provide supporting evidence for policy-makers to promote private charge post sharing, especially with certain consumer subsidization at a reasonable level

Contextual and Organizational Factors in Sustainable Supply Chain Decision-Making: Grey Relational Analysis and Interpretative Structural Modeling

Sustainable supply chain emerges as a major business trend essential to long-term competitive advantage. Relevant corporate decisions concern a broad range of factors and require novel analytical models for critical control. This study conducts mathematical analyses to identify the factors that are vital yet receiving insufficient attention from researchers and practitioners. Valid survey observations were collected from 113 enterprises in China, the biggest emerging economy that faces the dilemma between development and sustainability. Grey relational analysis (GRA) and interpretative structural modeling (ISM) assess the importance levels of contextual and organizational factors and explore their joint effects. Validated with conventional expert interviews, the results prioritize the factors that play crucial roles in sustainable supply chains. In particular, enterprises should pay close attention to three factors: corporate collaboration, clean production and supplier selection, which provide useful clues on the best practices of formulating low-carbon decisions. With a better understanding of critical factors, enterprises may make supply chains more sustainable with limited resources. To enhance the generalizability of findings, future studies may collect more observations from multiple countries and validate the results in the settings of global supply chains

Social Environment of Virtual Collaboration Using Mobile Social Media

Mobile social media such as WhatsApp and WeChat greatly facilitate virtual collaboration within and across organizations. Based on the theory of self-interest and collective action, this study investigates how social environment influences user behavior. Corresponding to social capital, weak ties, and adoption thresholds, extrinsic motivation, communication climate and top management support are identified respectively as the main factors of member environment, group environment and organization environment that impact virtual collaboration. The research model hypothesizes that these social-level variables interact with the psychological processes related to technology use at the individual level. The survey results from virtual teams provide supporting evidence to most hypothesized relationships. The findings yield some interesting theoretical and practical implications for the collaborative use of social information systems

Perceived Fit between Green IS and Green SCM: Does it Matter?

From a task-technology fit perspective, green SCM and green IS are likely to have synergistic effects on corporate sustainability. Yet, the exact mechanisms through which their perceived alignment by employees may exert influences on organizational performances are unclear. This study captures potential enablement and coverage routes at different development stages of sustainability with fit-as-mediation and fit-as-moderation, respectively. The results based on the observations collected from more than 400 organizations in the USA and China suggest that the perceived fit gradually shifts from a moderator role to a mediator role as the two green endeavors integrate with each other

Mobile social media in inter-organizational projects: Aligning tool, task and team for virtual collaboration effectiveness

Inter-organizational projects face unique challenges and opportunities due to team diversities and task complexity. Mobile social media like WhatsApp and WeChat emerge as new-generation collaboration tools in such endeavors. Based on a literature review, this study posits that how well team-tool, task-tool and team-task relationships are handled shape virtual collaboration effectiveness. The conceptual framework, validated with the interviews from inter-organizational project team members in China and the USA, leads to a research model. The results of a larger-scale survey confirm that tool usability, task fit and team connectivity contribute to virtual collaboration effectiveness, which affects project management success and team appreciation. In addition, there are noticeable cross-country differences, especially the opposite moderating effects that degree of use imposes on the relationship between virtual collaboration effectiveness and project management success. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed

GREEN INFORMATION SYSTEMS, GREEN CULTURE AND GREEN INNOVATION EFFECTIVENESS: A TRIAD MODEL

Contemporary organizations recognize the importance of green innovation for their competitive advantages in the long run, and most existing studies focus on its impacts on organizational performances. Based on the resource-based view, this study examines the roles that green information systems (IS) infrastructure and green culture play in green innovation as tangible and intangible resources. In addition to their direct impacts, green IS infrastructure and green culture may have indirect relationships with green innovation through the alignment between two as well as their alignments with green innovation. The hypothesized triadic relationships among green IS infrastructure, green culture and green innovation effectiveness were tested with survey observations collected from organizations in China. The statistical analyses supported all the direct relationships as hypothesized, but yielded mixed results on the mediating relationships. The alignment between GIS and green innovation had positive effect, the alignment between green IS and green culture had insignificant effect, and the alignment between green culture and green innovation had negative effect. In addition, each aspect of alignment played somewhat different roles across organizations of different sizes