Purchasing from multiple capital-constrained suppliers using order financing

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a critical role in supply chains and social stability. Unfortunately, SMEs often lack access to traditional bank financing. To develop SME suppliers, some creditworthy companies have built platforms to coordinate banks and suppliers by employing purchase order financing (POF). After noting that SMEs differ in terms of their operational flexibility and uncertainty, this research examines optimal purchasing portfolios on such platforms. Specifically, we construct a Stackelberg model involving one buyer and two suppliers and analyse the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker necessary conditions for a buyer’s strategy upon which the optimal portfolio can be achieved. According to the experiments that we design to simulate about 200,000 various scenarios, the large buyer only needs to consider the top five strategies. The choice of strategy mainly depends on cost differences of suppliers, and flexibility can be used as an identifier of the purchase quantity.