Abstract: The “3060” dual carbon goals set a new requirement for low-carbon development. The lowering cap of total carbon quota objectively confronts carbon-emitting enterprises with uncertainty in terms of their compliance with emission reduction standards. To this end, we draw on the practices of HP and Huawei incentivizing the supplier emission reduction compliance, and use carbon audit, a tool that can identify carbon emission reduction noncompliance, to design tolerance-based carbon audit mechanism and suppression-based carbon audit mechanism and further explore the impact of self-interest strategy and win-win strategy on the two carbon audit mechanisms. The results show that the optimal carbon audit mechanism under the two strategies depends on the buyer’s goodwill loss coefficient and sourcing price. Specifically, under the self-interested strategy, when the loss coefficient is low, or when the loss coefficient is moderate and sourcing price is low, the tolerance-based carbon audit mechanism is the dominant mechanism; when the loss coefficient is moderate and sourcing price is high, or when the loss coefficient is high, suppression-based carbon audit mechanism is the dominant mechanism. Under the win-win strategy, when the loss coefficient is low or moderate, the tolerance-based carbon audit mechanism is dominant if the sourcing price meets certain conditions. In addition, we also find that compared with the win-win strategy, the dominant mechanism under the self-interested strategy is more helpful to supplier carbon emission reduction compliance.

Key words: low-carbon supply chain, carbon emission reduction, compliance management, carbon audit, mechanism research