Abstract
Although government subsidies provide some financial support for firms to invest in low-carbon technologies, carbon price fluctuations bring greater uncertainty risks to firms' investment. The paper constructs a real option model to analyze the timing of low-carbon technology adoption between upstream dominant high energy consuming firms and downstream retailers in case of collaborative decision-making and Stackelberg game, and a numerical simulation is conducted to analyze factors affecting the timing for low-carbon investment. We find that the proportion of cost subsidies, carbon price volatility, carbon emission reduction rate, and cost-sharing ratio will affect firms to choose the optimal investment opportunity.