Mean Field Stackelberg Game for Production and Carbon Emission Reduction with State Reflections

Abstract

Global warming, driven by anthropogenic carbon emissions with transboundary pollution characteristics and irreversible damage, poses an existential threat to human society. This paper develops a novel two-level Stackelberg game with mean field interaction of controls and common noise which integrates hierarchical decision-making under a state-reflected emission dynamics. A central regulator (leader) adjusts product prices to guide $n$ heterogeneous competing regions (followers) while enforcing a hard emission cap via a reflection mechanism that models emergency reductions through a local time process. We establish the existence of an approximate Stackelberg equilibrium and perform sensitivity analysis via Monte Carlo simulations.