Small and medium-sized enterprises play a crucial role in sustaining economic development in both developed economies and developing economies, however, many of them suffer from chronic and structural difficulties in accessing external financing. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to illustrate how information structures work in the strategic interactions between banks and firms in a supply chain, and why the transaction information in a supply chain may serve to reduce information asymmetry and improve SMEs’ access to external financing. We find that under incomplete information, the transactions between SMEs and suppliers can serve as signals for banks, which may help banks access the private information of SMEs, thus reducing information asymmetry between them. To maximize profit, banks should dynamically adjust both their interest rate policies and risk management strategies when providing financing services to SMEs, according to the structure of the financial market. The improvement of the external financial environment for SMEs may benefit the entire supply chain, thus facilitating its sustainable development and the growth of SMEs. Our framework sheds light on how SMEs in a supply chain may enhance their survivability and facilitate their development through appropriate strategies to improve business performances and manage credit risks.

Uncertainty and ambiguity are frequently involved in the decision-making process in our daily life. This paper develops a generalized decision-making framework based on the prospect theory under an intuitionistic fuzzy environment, by closely integrating the prospect theory and the intuitionistic fuzzy sets into our framework. We demonstrate how to compute the intuitionistic fuzzy prospect values as the reference values for decision-making and elaborate a four-step editing phase and a valuation phase with two key functions: the value function and the weighting function. We then conduct experiments to test our decision- making methodology and the key features of our framework. The experimental results show that the shapes of the value function and the weighting function in our framework are in line with those of prospect theory. The methodology proposed in this paper to elicit prospects that are not only under uncertainty but also under ambiguity. We reveal the decision-making behavior pattern through comparing the parameters. People are less risk averse when making decisions under an intuitionistic fuzzy environment than under uncertainty. People still underestimate the probability of the events in our experiment. Further, the choices of participants in the experiments are consistent with the addition and multiplication principles of our framework.

No abstract