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Environmental issues have increasingly received attention in both industry and academia. Many firms have started to make sustainable investments, such as adopting the pollution-abatement technologies, to reduce carbon emissions. To investigate the impacts of the sustainable investment on firms' profit and emission reduction, we consider supply chains with uncertain demand in different power structures. Specifically, we examine the sustainable investment problem in three supply chain power structures, i.e., manufacturer Stackelberg (MS) power structure, vertical Nash (VN) power structure and retailer Stackelberg (RS) power structure. We first derive the optimal decisions for both the retailer and manufacturer in each power structure. Then, by comparing the results in the three power structures, we find that the manufacturer gets benefits from making the sustainable investment, especially in unequal power structures. When the average market size is large (small) enough, both of the supply chain members obtain more profits in the MS (RS) power structure. From an environmental perspective, we find that the emission reduction is more significant in sequential games (i.e., MS and RS power structures) than that in a simultaneous game (i.e., VN power structure). In addition, we conduct some numerical studies and discuss more managerial insights in the paper.

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Sustainability is a comprehensive concept that integrates at least three dimensions of environment, economy and society. The power system is the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions, adversely impacting environmental sustainability. It also generates necessary energy supplies, which promote economic and social sustainable development. Based on the sustainability nature of power system, this study puts forward an improved methodology, namely “Planning-Searching-Screening-Reporting-Reflecting” (PSSRR Cycle) to review the literature systematically on power system performance evaluation from a sustainability perspective over the past 20 years, with the aim of describing the current state of the whole performance evaluation system including the evaluation framework, evaluation indicators and evaluation methods, and providing research suggestions for future research. This study finds in the current literature that the Triple Bottom Line theory is the most commonly used theoretical evaluation framework; environmental and economic sustainability indicators are more emphasized; the DEA and MCDM methods are the more common evaluation methods. This study presents some future research notes, including improving the Sustainable Balanced Scorecard as a sustainable performance evaluation framework, emphasizing more social sustainability indicators, and using a combination of existing evaluation methods to make performance evaluation more efficient and accurate.

Variance investigation (VI) has been identified as an effective mechanism to reduce budgetary slack at the ex ante budgeting stage. This paper focuses on two further research questions: (1) the extent to which two different accountability-oriented control aspects (i.e., external investigation and self-reporting) of VI affect budgetary slack and (2) the extent of the moderating effect of moral development on the relationship between these two accountability-oriented control aspects and budgetary slack. Our experimental results show that both external investigation and self-reporting can reduce the propensity of creating slack at the ex ante budgeting stage. More specifically, the effect of external investigation on reducing the propensity of creating budgetary slack is greater than that of self-reporting. This study further reveals that moral development moderates the effect of external investigation on budgetary slack. When comparing subordinates with low moral development with those with high moral development, our results show that the effect of external investigation on budgetary slack is stronger among the former group than the latter group. This study does not find any moderating effect of moral development on the relationship between self-reporting and budgetary slack. Our study sheds some new light on varying effects of two accountability-oriented control aspects of VI on budgetary slack, which are also moderated by different levels of subordinates’ moral development. These results may be considered in the design and implementation of management control systems.