Abstract: The problem of global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions has become an important obstacle to promoting sustainable development. With the strengthening of environmental protection publicity and the intensification of climate change, consumers are paying more and more attention to the environmental image of enterprises, tending to buy low-carbon and environmentally friendly products, and willing to pay more for this. In order to better guide consumers to purchase low-carbon products and encourage enterprises to transform into low-carbon production, governments have divided and marked the low-carbon level of products by formulating low-carbon classification standards. At this time, the low-carbon classification standards of products, the relationship between the standards and consumers' low-carbon preferences, and how the two together affect the production decisions of enterprises have become the focus of government and enterprises. Considering the impact of product low-carbon characteristics and consumer low-carbon preferences on consumer purchase behavior, a heterogeneous corporate competition model is employed to study the relationship between the low-carbon classification standards of product and consumer low-carbon preferences, and the impact on corporate production decisions. The result shows that industry competition and emission reduction effects are affected by low-carbon classification standards and consumer low-carbon preferences, the changes in consumer low-carbon preferences is the key power to achieve emission reduction incentive. However, the direction and strength of the action of preferences are determined by the low-carbon classification standards of product. The classification standards can be divided into strict and loose; the strict standard will alleviate the problem of “pick-up” and have a two-way incentive. Moreover, the transformation of consumer low-carbon preferences into low-carbon behavior is significantly affected by the price system of products; the industry can achieve the goal of reducing average unit carbon emissions under the combined effect of these factors, but can’t reduce total emissions. At the same time, it revealed the inherent reasons for the increase in carbon emissions demand of low-emissions corporate and the shortcoming of traditional emission reduction mechanisms. The study provides a reference for the development of China’s emission reduction policy, corporate production decision.

Key words: low-carbon classification standards, low-carbon preferences, heterogeneous corporate, incentive, carbon emission