Effects of gift card on an environmental and a newsvendor issue

This article addresses the issues related to gift card incentive policies in relation to environmental issues and news outlets, in which demand is uncertain and depends on the unit price of recycling and discounts for gift cards offered by retailers to customers. The impact of carbon emissions, gift cards and product recycling on retail decisions is determined. For this purpose, three models of carbon emission incentives, direct cap, carbon cap and carbon tax were developed. In these models, the goal was to maximize profit function, for which the optimal amounts of order amount, gift card discount and recycling price were calculated. Finally, a numerical example was used to show the effect of parameters on the profit function and decision changes; then, sensitivity analysis was performed. Findings showed that recycle prices, order quantities, discount for the gift card and total profits decreased by increasing carbon taxes. Recycle price, order quantity, discount for the gift card and total profit increased with increasing carbon cap; also, increasing carbon price decreased the amount of recycle price, order quantity, discount for the gift card and total profits.