Joint finance and order decision for supply chain with capital constraint of retailer considering product defect

Small retailers usually face difficulties in obtaining bank loans due to inadequate credit history. Traditional commercial loan can be very costly or even unavailable to such retailers. In order to promote the collaboration of the supply chain to gain the mutual interest of all the parties, larger suppliers are generally willing to intermediate between retailers and commercial institutions. In this paper, the proper scheme and its efficiency of supplier intermediation in retailer financing are carefully investigated for the case of existing unreliable products. By building a Stackelberg game model, we show that the supplier intermediated financing scheme can significantly improve the supply chain partners’ profits. Furthermore, with an elaborate numerical analysis, we demonstrate that the retailer will be motivated to choose the financing strategy only when the loan interest rate is less than a certain threshold. Finally, we explore how the compensation for product defect influences the supply chain partners’ optimal strategies and profits, which show that the proper compensation can realize Pareto improvement of the supply chain.