考虑初创企业的供应链融资与期权交易策略

考虑单供应商、单零售商组成的二级供应链，零售商作为初创企业面临资金短缺，但可以通过供应商贷款获得资金。除了提供资金支持，供应商还为零售商提供期权合约供其采购产品。通过对供应商期权价格和贷款利率，以及零售商的采购和融资策略进行分析，结论显示当产品生产成本较高时，供应商会设置较高的期权价格和贷款利率，获取整个供应链的利润。零售商期望利润为0并且面临较高的破产风险，而此时的博弈均衡是不稳定的。为了获得稳定博弈均衡，供应商需要稍微降低期权价格或贷款利率，以使零售商获得正的期望利润，此时零售商采购量会趋近于一个固定值。当生产成本较低时，供应商和零售商之间能够达到稳定的均衡解，且双方均有正的期望利润。

Supply Chain Financing with Option Contract for Start-up Companies

Many firms have capital constraint, especially the small and medium sized enterprises. In recent years, supply chain finance plays an important role in solving capital constraint problems and has received a great deal of attention. In this paper, a two-echelon supply chain consisting of single supplier and single capital constraint retailer facing uncertain market demand is studied. The retailer purchases from the supplier and the supplier offers short-term credit loan as well as an option contract to the retailer. By building a Stackelberg game model and through backward induction analyses, the supplier's optimal decisions on option price and interest rate, and the retailer's corresponding optimal ordering and financing decisions are examined. Our results show that when the supplier's production cost is lower than a threshold, a stable equilibrium between the supplier and retailer can be achieved and the optimal order size is greater than a certain number q_α, where q_α satisfies q_αf(q_α)/(1-F(q_α))=1. Under this circumstance, both the supplier and retailer enjoy positive expected profit. When the supplier's production cost is higher than a threshold, the supplier will set high option price and interest rate to absorb all the expected profit in the supply chain, and the optimal order size is less than q_α. However, under this circumstance, the retailer gets zero expected profit from selling and suffers from high bankruptcy risk, therefore the equilibrium is unstable. To reach a stable state, the supplier has to decrease either the option price or interest rate to provide the retailer with positive marginal profit, and then the optimal order size converges to q_α but still greater than q_α. It is also found that even if an option contract cannot coordinate the decentralized supply chain in the presence of capital constraint, it improves the supply chain's performance compared with a wholesale price contract. Several managerial insights are provided in this paper.First,when the downstream retailer has capital constraint, it is optimal for the upstream supplier to offer it short-term loan. Second, when the retailer has severe capital constraint and purchases with the money from short-term loan, it may take risky actions, i.e., keep its order size at a high level. Therefore, the supplier, who offers the short-term loan, should pay close attention to the retailer's actions and keep its bankruptcy risk under control. Finally, compared with awholesale price contract, an option contract can improve the supply chain efficiency in the presence of capital constraint.