Purchase Order Financing: Credit, Commitment, and Supply Chain Consequences

Matthew Reindorp, Fehmi Tanrisever, Anne Lange
2018 Operations Research  
We study a supply chain where a retailer buys from a supplier who faces financial constraints. Informational problems about the supplier's demand prospects and production capabilities restrict her access to capital. By committing to a minimum purchase quantity, the retailer can mitigate these informational problems and expand the supplier's feasible production set. We assume a newsvendor model of operations and analyze the strategic interaction of the two parties as a sequential game. Key
more » ... ters in our model are the supplier's ex ante credit limit, her informational transparency-which conditions the amount of additional capital released by the commitment-and the demand characteristics of the final market. We show that in equilibrium the supplier can benefit from a lower ex ante credit limit or lower informational transparency. The retailer always benefits from an increase in these parameters. We also indicate limits to the commitment approach: under certain conditions, the retailer may prefer to relax the supplier's financial constraint by adjusting the wholesale price, or a combination of wholesale price and commitment. Our study provides a novel perspective on capital market frictions in supply chains.
doi:10.1287/opre.2018.1727 fatcat:a3waqk52kzdj5gwvjw7orqjv6i