Financing deep-tier suppliers in a pull supply chain under blockchain technology
Chengfu Wang, Xiangfeng Chen, Qiang Yan, Wei Jin, Umair Tanveer · International Journal of Production Research · 2025
We investigate two financing types for deep-tier suppliers: financing between adjacent supply chain tiers (FAT) in the traditional supply chain and financing crossing supply chain tiers (FCT) in the blockchain-driven supply chain. Exploring Stackelberg game models and analyzing the monotonicity of equilibrium variables, we find that FCT yields a larger equilibrium production quantity than FAT, resulting in a higher supply chain efficiency over FAT. However, the manufacturer and retailer in FCT will set lower wholesale prices for purchasing from their upstream partners. As the financing fund provider, the retailer can always gain a larger profit via FCT than via FAT. For the supplier and manufacturer, they can obtain larger profits in FCT than in FAT when the supplier's working capital is below a threshold and the minimum limits of lenders' interest rates are at medium levels. Interestingly, FCT hurts the supplier's benefit when the supplier has a relatively high working capital or the minimum limit of the manufacturer's interest rate is relatively high. Considering the credit risk, market demand uncertainty, and blockchain adoption cost, the conclusions that FCT increases the equilibrium production quantity and thus brings a higher profit to each supply chain partner under certain conditions are still valid.