Sustainable Operations for Fashion Manufacturing: A Dynamic Time-Varying Framework
研究了时尚制造商如何随时间动态平衡可持续实践与盈利，通过动态博弈模型分析消费者估值与可持续性之间的反馈循环，并优化产品与过程可持续投资的时变分配。
The highly pollution-intensive fashion industry requires manufacturers to do substantial sustainable practices over time. Concurrently, customers’ environmental awareness challenges manufacturers to balance sustainability efforts with profitability and meet customers’ evolving inclinations. Prior literature has primarily considered customers’ preferences for eco-friendly fashion without examining the feedback between time-varying customers’ valuation and manufacturers’ sustainability. The recognized challenges and research deficiencies motivate us to incorporate feedback mechanisms in sustainable fashion manufacturing management. Moreover, this study explores how consumerism influences manufacturers’ sustainable fashion over time and simultaneously analyzes sustainability effects on customers’ valuation of fashion products. The innovative framework introduced in this study for tackling sustainable operations uses a dynamic game theory modeling to explore the complex interactions and feedback loops between customers’ valuation trends and fashion manufacturers’ evolving sustainability efforts over time. The contributions of our study to sustainable fashion business studies are (a) analytically modeling the dynamic interplay between customers’ valuation and sustainability as two critical states of the fashion system, incorporating separate decision variables for product-focused and process-focused sustainability, (b) analyzing how consumerism and demand patterns impact sustainability and customer perceptions, and (c) determining optimal time-varying allocation between product vs. process sustainability investments to maximize profitability under shifting preferences. We view sustainability both as a continuous process and a measurable outcome. Findings suggest that investing in sustainability benefits fashion brands when customers change styles slowly and companies focus on durable products. Moreover, this study generates managerial insights on the implications of time-varying sustainability for fashion industry stakeholders, decision-makers, and researchers.