Cap-and-trade, a widely used carbon regulation policy, encourages firms to adopt carbon abatement technologies to reduce emissions. Traditional supply-chain literature on this policy assumes symmetrical information, overlooking the fact that carbon abatement efforts and costs are often private and vary significantly across geographies, industries, and pollutants. In this paper we explore a dual-channel setting involving a manufacturer and a retailer, where the manufacturer, subject to cap-and-trade regulations, has undisclosed information about its carbon abatement costs. Our findings reveal that high abatement costs can paradoxically benefit the manufacturer, the environment, consumers, and overall social welfare. Our result also cautions that a higher carbon trading price (e.g., due to more ambitious emission reduction targets) can disincentivize the manufacturer from investing in carbon abatement. Moreover, a higher production cost, while resulting in lower market output, can increase pollution generation. We contribute the following to the practitioner debate about the impact of carbon policies: for an industry with a large market size, our findings lend support to governments to implement a cap-and-trade policy, because the manufacturer, customers and social welfare can be better off under a cap-and-trade policy than under a tax policy or no carbon policy. Additionally, we suggest that in such industries, governments need not enforce information transparency within the supply chain.

中文翻译：

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在信息不对称的情况下，在双通道设置下进行限额与交易


限额与交易是一项广泛使用的碳监管政策，鼓励公司采用碳减排技术来减少排放。关于这项政策的传统供应链文献假设信息对称，而忽略了碳减排工作和成本通常是私人的，并且因地域、行业和污染物而异。在本文中，我们探讨了一种涉及制造商和零售商的双渠道设置，其中制造商受限额与交易法规的约束，拥有有关其碳减排成本的未披露信息。我们的研究结果表明，高减排成本可能会自相矛盾地使制造商、环境、消费者和整体社会福利受益。我们的结果还警告说，更高的碳交易价格（例如，由于更雄心勃勃的减排目标）可能会抑制制造商对碳减排的投资。此外，较高的生产成本虽然导致市场产量降低，但会增加污染的产生。我们为关于碳政策影响的从业者辩论做出了以下贡献：对于一个市场规模较大的行业，我们的研究结果为政府实施限额与交易政策提供了支持，因为在限额与交易政策下，制造商、客户和社会福利可能比在税收政策或无碳政策下过得更好。此外，我们建议在这些行业中，政府不需要在供应链中实施信息透明度。