This paper considers a two-echelon supply chain that has a supplier and two capital constrained retailers and in which the retailers compete in a Cournot fashion. We study the impact of external financing on the players' optimal decisions and supply chain performance. We show that as competition intensity increases, the supplier (as the Stackelberg leader) may consider merging with one retailer to avoid double marginalization. Yet, the deselected retailer may utilize external financing to return to the supply chain. We explicitly model the evolution of equilibrium scenarios and identify the conditions under which the supplier may prefer to provide trade credit to only one retailer and the other retailer may use external financing. We also carry out extensive sensitivity analyses with respect to a retailer's capital structure and the retailer's competition intensity.
Abstract. When a firm faces an uncertain demand, it is common to procure supply using some type of option in addition to spot purchases. A typical version of this problem involves capacity being purchased in advance, with a separate payment made that applies only to the part of the capacity that is needed. We consider a discrete version of this problem in which competing suppliers choose a reservation price and an execution price for blocks of capacity, and the buyer, facing known distributions of demand and spot price, needs to decide which blocks to reserve. We show how to solve the buyer's (combinatorial) problem efficiently and also show that suppliers can do no better than offer blocks at execution prices that match their costs, making profits only from the reservation part of their bids. Finally we show that in an equilibrium the buyer selects the welfare maximizing set of blocks.
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