Equilibrium Financing in a Distribution Channel with Capital Constraint

There exist capital constraints in many distribution channels. We examine a channel consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer, where the retailer is capital constrained. The retailer may fund its business by borrowing credit either from a competitive bank market or from the manufacturer, provided the latter is willing to lend. When only one credit type (either bank or trade credit) is viable, we show that trade credit financing generally charges a higher wholesale price and thus becomes less attractive than bank credit financing for the retailer. When both bank and trade credits are viable, the unique equilibrium is trade credit financing if production cost is relatively low but is bank credit financing otherwise. We also study the case where both the retailer and the manufacturer are capital constrained and demonstrate that, to improve the overall supply chain efficiency, the bank should finance the manufacturer if production cost is low but finance the retailer otherwise. Our analysis further suggests that the equilibrium region of trade credit financing shrinks as demand variability or the retailer's internal capital level increases.     

资金约束供应链RFID投资决策与融资优化

本文以一个供应商和一个存在库存错放的资金约束零售商组成的两级供应链为研究对象,探讨了供应链成员采用无线射频识别（Radio Frequency Identification,RFID）技术的决策及融资选择问题。基于报童模型构建了供应链成员是否采用RFID技术、以及零售商选择贸易信贷融资或银行融资四种情景下的收益模型,求解出链上各成员的最优收益并探讨了RFID采用决策及融资选择策略。研究发现：资金约束零售商通过银行借贷融资可以获得更多的融资金额,但是其选择贸易信贷融资的意愿随着自有资金的减少而增强;当零售商自有资金适中时,随着错放率的上升或RFID成本的降低,零售商从银行融资向贸易信贷融资转变;银行融资在一定程度上能够缓解零售商的库存错放问题。     

考虑风险规避的资金约束供应链最优信用契约设计

本文针对零售商的资金约束问题,研究了风险规避的供应商如何通过设计信用契约影响零售商的融资结构。构建了包含供应商、零售商以及银行在内的供应链融资模型,给出了供应商的最优信用契约决策、零售商的最优库存决策以及银行的最优利率决策。进一步分析了供应商的风险规避程度对最优信用契约决策的影响。研究表明：当供应商的风险规避程度低于某个临界值时,供应商偏好提供全额信用,从而零售商的融资结构为单一的交易信用融资;而当供应商的风险规避程度高于该临界值时,供应商偏好提供部分信用,从而零售商的融资结构为组合融资。最后,通过数值算例验证了本文的结论。本研究一定程度上丰富了现有供应链金融的理论研究,为供应链核心企业与银行的决策提供了依据与参考。     

The Newsvendor Problem and Price‐Only Contract When Bankruptcy Costs Exist

We study a supply chain of a supplier selling via a wholesale price contract to a financially constrained retailer who faces stochastic demand. The retailer might need to borrow money from a bank to execute his order. The bank offers a fairly priced loan for relevant risks. Failure of loan repayment leads to a costly bankruptcy (fixed administrative costs, costs proportional to sales, and a depressed collateral value). We identify the retailer's optimal order quantity as a function of the wholesale price and his total wealth (working capital and collateral). The analysis of the supplier's optimal wholesale price problem as a Stackelberg game, with the supplier the leader and the retailer the follower, leads to unique equilibrium solutions in wholesale price and order quantity, with the equilibrium order quantity smaller than the traditional newsvendor one. Furthermore, in the presence of the retailer's bankruptcy risks, increases in the retailer's wealth lead to increased supplier's wholesale prices, but without the retailer's bankruptcy risks the supplier's wholesale prices stay the same or decrease in retailer's wealth.     

Implications for the Role of Retailers in Quality Assurance

We investigate a manufacturer–retailer channel to explore the role of a retailer in assuring the quality of a manufacturer's product as a quality gatekeeper. Such a gatekeeping activity can entail a reduction in the defective rate for consumers, if the retailer charges the manufacturer a penalty for each identified defect that is no smaller than the market penalty for an unidentified defect. As a result of the retailer's gatekeeping, the change in the negotiated wholesale price only depends on the manufacturer's individual benefit, whereas the change in the retailer's optimal retail price is associated with the channel‐wide benefit. When the impact of quality relative to retail price on demand is higher, the retailer benefits more from her gatekeeping activity, thus having a greater incentive to take on the quality gatekeeping responsibility. Moreover, the retailer's gatekeeping generates a larger increase in the demand as well as each firm's profit, when the retailer has a stronger relative bargaining power.     

When Does a Retailer's Advance Selling Capability Benefit Manufacturer,Retailer, or Both?

Advance selling (AS) from a retailer to consumers is commonly observed in practice. With an AS capability, a retailer has the option to sell in advance or not. Having the AS option seems to increase flexibility and thus profit for a retailer. However, we show that the AS option can hurt the retailer's profit as well as supply chain performance. We identify two thresholds for a product's marginal production cost. A retailer's AS option benefits both the manufacturer and retailer when the marginal production cost is high, that is, above both thresholds. It benefits the manufacturer but hurts the retailer when the marginal production cost is moderate, that is, between the two thresholds. The result is ambiguous when the marginal production cost is low, that is, below both thresholds. We find that consumer valuation uncertainty under AS is the key driving force for the surprising result that having the retailer's AS option can hurt the retailer. When compared to the scenario where the retailer does not have the AS option, we find that the manufacturer's optimal wholesale price weakly decreases under the retailer's AS option if the marginal production cost is high. The statement is reversed if the marginal production cost is moderate or low.     

The Retail Space‐Exchange Problem with Pricing and Space Allocation Decisions

We consider retail space‐exchange problems where two retailers exchange shelf space to increase accessibility to more of their consumers in more locations without opening new stores. Using the Hotelling model, we find two retailers’ optimal prices, given their host and guest space in two stores under the space‐exchange strategy. Next, using the optimal space‐dependent prices, we analyze a non‐cooperative game, where each retailer makes a space allocation decision for the retailer's own store. We show that the two retailers will implement such a strategy in the game, if and only if their stores are large enough to serve more than one‐half of their consumers. Nash equilibrium for the game exists, and its value depends on consumers’ utilities and trip costs as well as the total available space in each retailer's store. Moreover, as a result of the space‐exchange strategy, each retailer's prices in two stores are both higher than the retailer's price before the space exchange, but they may or may not be identical.     

供应链融资模式下零售商的订货与定价研究

已有零售商订货与定价问题的研究大都忽略了零售商的初始资金,本文在考虑零售商初始资金的情况下,研究零售商面对初始资金不足时,如何借助外部的融资政策做出最优的订货与定价决策.因此,本文分别讨论了零售商在无融资服务,供应链中核心制造商担保下的外部融资服务及核心制造商提供商业信用的内部融资服务下的订货与定价问题,并建立了相应的...     

Fairness in Selling to the Newsvendor

This paper studies the impact of fairness concerns on supply chain performance (SCP) in the two‐party newsvendor setting. We extend prior fairness analysis to a wide range of demand distributions, and also allow the degree and definition of fairness to assume a broader range of preferences than those in prior literature. Contrary to prior literature, we find that if the retailer's ideal allocation to the supplier is not sufficiently large, regardless of demand variability, a fair‐minded retailer makes no difference to system efficiency when facing a traditional profit‐maximizing supplier. Only when the retailer's ideal allocation to the supplier is above a threshold can the retailer's fairness concern improve the system efficiency for sufficiently high demand uncertainty. In order for the retailer's fairness concern to improve expected profits of both parties compared to the traditional supply chain case (win–win), the demand uncertainty cannot be too low, the retailer is not very averse to disadvantageous inequity, and his ideal allocation to the supplier is within a specific range. If only the supplier is concerned for fairness, the results range from worsening to improving (but not coordinating) the system and a win–win situation is impossible. Finally, when both the supplier and retailer are fair‐minded, SCP is improved unless both parties prefer to allocate small portions of system profit to the other. Again, win–win will be achieved only when the demand uncertainty is sufficiently high, the retailer's ideal allocation is within a certain range, and he is not very averse to disadvantageous inequity.     

时变供需下基于商业信用的零售商最优订货策略

论文在时变供需环境下,即市场需求为斜坡式时间函数及补货率依赖于市场需求情境下,探讨了基于商业信用的供应链中零售商最优订货策略。首先,根据商业信用期和零售商补货周期的关系,分两种情形构建了零售商库存模型;其次,根据零售商的库存模型,证明了其最优解的存在,并给出相关的命题和算法来求解零售商的最优库存策略;最后,通过数值算例和灵敏度分析来论证文中的有关结论。研究发现:当供应商给予零售商的商业信用期较短时,此时市场需求仍处于增长期,随着市场需求稳定时间点的增大,零售商的最优订货周期逐渐减小,最优订货量和年费用也逐渐减小;当供应商给予零售商的商业信用期较长时,此时市场需求已趋于稳定期,随着市场需求稳定时间点的增大,零售商的最优订货周期逐渐增大,最优订货量和年费用也逐渐增大;当供应商生产与市场需求依赖性逐渐增大时,零售商的最优订货周期逐渐增大,最优订货量及年费用也逐渐增大。     

Gray Markets and Supply Chain Incentives

“Gray markets” are unauthorized channels that distribute a branded product without the manufacturer's permission. Since gray markets are not officially sanctioned by the manufacturer, their existence is assumed to hurt the manufacturer. Yet manufacturers sometimes tolerate or even encourage gray market activities. We investigate the incentives of a manufacturer and its authorized retailer to engage in (or tolerate) gray markets. The firms need to consider the trade‐off between the positive effects of a gray market (price discrimination and cost savings) and the negative effects (cannibalization of sales and a loss in consumer valuation). Generally, gray markets can be categorized into two types: (i) a “local gray market,” where a retailer diverts products to unauthorized sellers operating in the same region as the retailer; and, (ii) “bootlegging,” where the retailer diverts products to unauthorized sellers in another market where the manufacturer sells through a direct channel. We characterize the equilibrium in each type of gray market and identify conditions under which the retailer will divert products to the gray market. Incentive problems are more complicated when the retailer bootlegs and, in this case, we show that conflicting incentives may lead to the emergence of a gray market where both the manufacturer's and retailer's profits decrease.     

Coordinating contracts for a financially constrained supply chain

We consider a financially constrained supply chain in which a supplier (leader) sells products to a retailer (follower) who has no access to bank financing due to her low credit rating. However, the supplier can borrow from a bank and offer trade credit to the retailer to alleviate her financial constraint. Failure to pay off a bank loan or trade credit incurs a variable default cost. We analyze the centralized version of the supply chain to obtain new coordination requirements. We then examine whether revenue-sharing, buyback, and all-unit quantity discount contracts can coordinate our supply chain. We show that the all-unit quantity discount contract fails to coordinate. However, the revenue-sharing and buyback contracts can coordinate the supply chain, but only when the supply chain has a sufficient total working capital. Moreover, they cannot allocate profit flexibly unless the supplier has a large enough working capital. Finally, we design a generalized revenue-sharing contract that coordinates the supply chain with flexible profit allocation, and also show by numerical examples its superiority over the revenue-sharing and buyback contracts.     

Role of Random Capacity Risk and the Retailer in Decentralized Supply Chains with Competing Suppliers

This research considers a supply chain under the following conditions: (i) two heterogeneous suppliers are in competition, (ii) supply capacity is random and pricing is endogenous, (iii) consumer demand, with and without an intermediate retailer, is price dependent. Specifically, we examine how uncertainty in supply capacity affects optimal ordering and pricing decisions, supplier and retailer profits, and the incentives to reduce such uncertainty. When two suppliers sell through a monopolistic retailer, supply uncertainty not only affects the retailer's diversification strategy for replenishment, but also changes the suppliers’ wholesale price competition and the incentive for reducing capacity uncertainty. In this dual‐sourcing model, we show that the benefit of reducing capacity uncertainty depends on the cost heterogeneity between the suppliers. In addition, we show that a supplier does not necessarily benefit from capacity variability reduction. We contrast this incentive misalignment with findings from the single‐supplier case and a supplier‐duopoly case where both suppliers sell directly to market without the monopolistic retailer. In the latter single‐supplier and duopoly cases, we prove that the unreliable supplier always benefits from reducing capacity variability. These results highlight the role of the retailer's diversification strategy in distorting a supplier's incentive for reducing capacity uncertainty under supplier price competition.     

产品市场竞争优势、资本结构与商业信用支持——基于中国上市公司的实证研究

以2005年-2013年中国上市公司为样本,探讨产品市场竞争优势的含义及度量方法,产品市场竞争优势对企业资本结构与商业信用支持的影响,以及宏观、行业和微观因素如何发挥调节作用.研究发现:第一,产品市场竞争优势有助于降低企业的负债水平,并刺激企业对上下游企业提供更多的商业信用支持;第二,在经济越发达的地区、竞争强度越弱的行业,以及民营控股上市公司中,产品市场竞争优势会进一步降低企业的负债水平,同时加强其对上下游企业的商业信用支持.研究结论为从理论上更加全面和准确地理解产品市场竞争优势与企业资本结构和商业信用支持的关系提供了新的科学依据.     

Contracting and Coordination under Asymmetric Production Cost Information

We analyze a supply chain consisting of a supplier and a retailer. The supplier's unit production cost, which characterizes his type, is only privately known to him. When trading with the retailer, the supplier demands a reservation profit that depends on his unit production cost. We model this problem as a game of adverse selection. In this model, the retailer offers a menu of contracts, each of which consists of two parameters: the ordering quantity and the supplier's share of the channel profit. We show that the optimal contract depends critically on a surrogate measure—the ratio of the types’ reservation profit differential to their production cost differential. An important implication from our analysis is that information asymmetry alone does not necessarily induce loss in channel efficiency. The optimal contract can coordinate the supply chain as long as the low‐cost supplier's cost efficiency is neither much overvalued nor much undervalued in the outside market. We further discuss the retailer's preference of the supplier's type under different market conditions, as well as evaluate the effects of the supplier's reservation profit, the retail price, and the demand uncertainty on the optimal contract.     

Supplier Encroachment and Investment Spillovers

It is conventional wisdom that a manufacturer's encroachment into retail space will likely hurt an existing retailer. In contrast to this conventional belief, current research indicates that a retailer may welcome a manufacturer's encroachment despite the new competition in the final market. The encroachment may help the manufacturer have some “skin in the game” at the retail level, which will cause the manufacturer to make a selfish cost‐reducing investment that spills over to the retailer as a lower wholesale price. Such a spillover effect enhances the retailer's profit as long as the encroachment does not result in extreme retail competition by a certain degree of product differentiation, and ultimately generates Pareto gains in the supply chain. The spillover effect is so robust that the retailer's benefit from the encroachment remains even after considering potential mitigating factors such as selling costs, a nonlinear form of cost reduction, decentralized encroachment, additional retail competition, price competition, and a negotiation between the manufacturer and the retailer.     

Pre‐Orders for New To‐be‐Released Products Considering Consumer Loss Aversion

Advance selling through pre‐orders is a strategy to transfer inventory risk from a retailer to consumers. A newsvendor retailer can have three strategies to choose from: no advance selling allowed (NAS), moderate advance selling with a moderate discount for pre‐orders (MAS), and deep advance selling with a deep discount for pre‐orders (DAS). This research studies how a retailer could design an advance selling strategy to maximize her own profits. We find some interesting results. For example, there exist two thresholds for the selling season profit margin and two thresholds for consumer's expected valuation. For products with higher profit margin than the high threshold on profit margin, a retailer should always use DAS. For products with medium profit margin within the two thresholds, a retailer should adopt MAS if consumer's expected valuation is lower than the high threshold and use DAS otherwise. For products with lower profit margin than the low threshold, a retailer should use NAS, DAS, or MAS, respectively, if consumer's expected valuation is lower than the low threshold, higher than the high threshold, or between the two thresholds, respectively. Through sensitivity analyses, we also show the effects of multiple consumer characteristics on a retailer's optimal advance selling strategy.     

Cooperative Advertising and Pricing in a Dynamic Stochastic Supply Chain: Feedback Stackelberg Strategies

Cooperative (co‐op) advertising is an important instrument for aligning manufacturer and retailer decisions in supply chains. In this, the manufacturer announces a co‐op advertising policy, i.e., a participation rate that specifies the percentage of the retailer's advertising expenditure that it will provide. In addition, it also announces the wholesale price. In response, the retailer chooses its optimal advertising and pricing policies. We model this supply chain problem as a stochastic Stackelberg differential game whose dynamics follows Sethi's stochastic sales‐advertising model. We obtain the condition when offering co‐op advertising is optimal for the manufacturer. We provide in feedback form the optimal advertising and pricing policies for the manufacturer and the retailer. We contrast the results with the advertising and price decisions of the vertically integrated channel, and suggest a method for coordinating the channel.     

The Effect of Delayed Incentives on Supply Chain Profits and Consumer Surplus

We examine the use of consumer cash mail‐in rebates offered by a manufacturer in a Stackelberg game where the manufacturer is the leader and the retailer is the follower. Our analysis indicates that rebates are profitable for manufacturers if consumers are inconsistent in the sense that their rebate valuation when they make purchase decisions is independent of their redemption probabilities when they make redemption decisions. If the manufacturer keeps the wholesale price unchanged, then the rebate increases the retailer's profit by a larger amount than the increase in the manufacturer's profit. If the manufacturer jointly optimizes the wholesale price and rebate, then the increase in the manufacturer's profit is twice the increase in the retailer's profit. The retailer responds to rebates by increasing the retail price, which increases the margin paid by consumers who do not redeem the rebate. On average, consumer surplus decreases when it is optimal for manufacturers to offer rebates. We suggest incentive schemes that make it worthwhile for retailers to limit the price increase. In these incentive schemes, the manufacturer imposes a negative relationship between the rebate value and the retail price. We show that such incentives increase supply chain profits.     

Supply Chain Design and Carbon Penalty: Monopoly vs. Monopolistic Competition

This paper studies whether imposing carbon costs changes the supply chain structure and social welfare. We explore the problem from a central policymaker's perspective who wants to maximize social welfare. We consider two stakeholders, retailers, and consumers, who optimize their own objectives (i.e., profits and net utility) and three competitive settings (i.e., monopoly, monopolistic competition with symmetric market share, and monopolistic competition with asymmetric market share). For the monopoly case, we find that when the retailer's profit is high, imposing some carbon emission charges on the retailer and the consumers does not substantially change the supply chain structure or the social welfare. However, when the retailer's profit is low, imposing carbon costs optimally can lead to a significant increase in social welfare. Moreover, the impact of imposing carbon emission charges becomes more significant when the degree of competition increases. Additionally, the quantum of benefit may depend only on factors common across industries, such as fuel and carbon costs.