The green R&D and production have gained more and more enterprise attention. Green behavior can meet consumers green preferences and government policies in the dilemma that the rapid development of the economy creates environmental problems and the deterioration of the global climate has become an important issue of concern to the international community. In practice, Haier Bio has been actively undertaking the corporate responsibility of green development, and the concept of green and green development runs through the whole process and chain of production and operation, constantly promoting the green transformation and upgrading of the enterprise. In the design process, carbon neutral design is adopted from the beginning of design to realize the energy-saving upgrade of products. In response to the national goal of carbon neutralization in 2045, “rapidly reduce green emissions, actively carry out carbon reduction work in the field of R&D”, China Great Wall focuses on the three key areas of “energy saving green technology, green material application, energy reconstruction”, and develops green vehicles to help China’s environmental protection cause. At the same time, major political and legislative initiatives have been proposed to better incentivize enterprises’ green activities. For example, The Paris climate Conference in 2016 resulted in a major intergovernmental agreement obliging signatory governments and government agencies to provide incentives in terms of financial or legislative assistance to support and scale up green products and technologies in different industries. Chinese President Xi Jinping announced at the Climate Ambition Summit sponsored by the United Nations and relevant countries that China will adopt more effective policies and measures, including subsidy for manufacturers based on the number of green and low-carbon products they produce and sell. Through subsidy, the government can stimulate manufacturers to increase investment in green technology and improve the greenness of products. For the above reasons, the areas about supply chain operation and government subsidy strategy for green R&D always are the research hotspots in theory and practice.

With the rapid development of the Internet and the digital economy, platform economy based on networking, digitalization, and smart technology is conducive to promoting the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure, improving user experience, flourishing various markets, improving the efficiency of resource allocation in the whole society, and injecting new vitality into the traditional economy. Enterprises gradually realize that platform is the core of supply chain system construction and development. It can give full play to its data advantages to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions in the operation process of the industrial chain. Therefore, it is important to study how the government guides manufacturers to participate in the operation of smart platform supply chain, and to invest in green technologies to improve ecological benefits while taking into account economic benefits. Platforms can provide two cooperative modes for manufacturers to sale products, agency selling, and reselling. For example, JD.COM works with brands such as Huawei, Coach and Burberry under the reselling model, in which the brands sell their products to JD.COM at wholesale prices, which JD.COM sells to consumers at a markup. However, when JD.COM cooperates with Topsports, Sephora and other brands, it adopts the agent selling mode. By this way, the manufacture can sell products to consumers directly through the platform of JD.COM, and JD.COM charges a certain service commission fee (JD.COM public welfare, 2020). Amazon started with a reselling mode, as the mode developed, Amazon broke the reselling model which is similar to the entity retail model, and adopted an agency selling mode to help enterprises sell products directly to the terminal consumer. In addition, due to the platform’s natural data collection advantages, the platform supply chain is based on data-driven analysis to describe, predict, analyze, and guide consumer behavior, providing better marketing activities for green products, that is data-driven marketing (DDM). For example, in September 2018, Taobao created a series of data-based and content-based targeted marketing programs for Shiseido, and established Shiseido’s specific data center bank to provide data for marketing. In 2018, JD.COM adopted data-driven marketing to cooperate with many well-known brands in the industry, such as mobile phone brand Huawei, food brand Lang Jiu, and home appliance brand Bear. At the same time, data-driven marketing generates new types of costs, such as data collection costs and data analysis costs. Research on the promotion effect of smart marketing level on green products can provide effective guidance and help for green R&D activities in reality. Operating platform supply chain can help enterprises to improve the efficiency of green technology investment activities and realize the overall development of economic and ecological benefits.

In this background, three questions must be answered: (1) How does the potential market demand of green products, the sensitivities of consumers to green product attributes and data analysis technology affect the levels of the manufacturer’s green technology and the platform’s data-driven marketing, as well as all member’s profits in a platform supply chain system? (2) Which is the best strategy (the agency selling or reselling strategy) that can make higher levels of green technology and data-driven marketing, gaining more profit for all members, and how does the service commission rate affect the manufacturer’s selling strategy choice? (3) Are government subsidies related to green technology conducive to the manufacturer to improve the level of green technology, and is it conducive to all members to obtain more profit, and how does the government subsidy affects the system members’ choice about agency selling or reselling strategy?

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/su14073992