Nowadays, along with increased public environmental awareness and widespread upstream investments in green production, some retailers have begun to invest in the packaging and distribution processes to shape their public images and enhance their competitiveness. However, under the pressure of competition and existing upstream investments, retailers' incentives to invest may be weakened. In this paper, we study whether and when competing retailers should invest and explore the performance of the equilibrium outcome. First, we find that a retailer prefers to invest only with a high efficiency, which can endow her with a considerable demand improvement at an acceptable cost level. Second, we demonstrate that a retailer counterintuitively will not always benefit from her rival's investment inefficiency because the manufacturer in this case will reduce his investment level, which cannot sufficiently expand the product market size. Third, we verify the existence of a prisoner's dilemma for retailers under a medium investment efficiency because although green investment enhances demand, it also increases the unit cost and subsequently the retail price. Additionally, a retailer facing competition is especially unwilling to improve her price compared with her rival. Fourth, we present an interesting insight that the prisoner’ dilemma area will be decreased with a sufficient upstream investment efficiency since a retailer will focus less on the downstream competition for market occupation but more on the upstream investment that can expand the total market size. The decreased hostility alleviates the prisoner’ dilemma.

如今，随着公众对环保意识的增强和上游对绿色生产的广泛投资，一些零售商已开始在包装和分销过程中进行投资，以塑造其公众形象并增强其竞争力。但是，在竞争和现有上游投资的压力下，零售商的投资动机可能会减弱。在本文中，我们研究了竞争零售商是否以及何时进行投资，并探讨了均衡结果的表现。首先，我们发现零售商更喜欢仅以高效率进行投资，这可以使她以可接受的成本水平获得可观的需求改善。其次，我们证明零售商违反直觉不会总是从竞争对手那里受益。的投资效率低下，因为制造商在这种情况下会降低其投资水平，从而无法充分扩大产品市场规模。第三，我们验证了在中等投资效率下零售商存在囚徒困境的原因，因为尽管绿色投资增加了需求，但它同时也增加了单位成本和随后的零售价格。此外，面对竞争的零售商尤其不愿意与竞争对手相比提高价格。第四，我们提出了一个有趣的见解，即囚犯的困境区域将以充分的上游投资效率而减少，因为零售商将较少关注下游市场占领的竞争，而更多地关注可以扩大总市场规模的上游投资。减少的敌意减轻了囚犯的困境。