Supply chain financing using blockchain: impacts on supply chains selling fashionable products

Abstract

Today, supply chain finance is a very important topic. Traditional supply chains rely on banks to support the related financing activities and services. With the emergence of blockchain technology, more and more companies in different industries have considered using it to support supply chain finance. In this paper, we study supply chain financing problems in supply chains selling fashionable products. Modeling under the standard newsvendor problem setting with a single manufacturer and a single retailer employing a revenue sharing contract, we develop analytical models for both the traditional and blockchain-supported supply chains. We derive the optimal contracting and quantity decisions in each supply chain with Nash bargaining between the manufacturer and retailer. We analytically show how the revenue sharing contract can coordinate both types of supply chains. We then compare the optimal systems performances between the two supply chains. We prove that the blockchain-supported supply chain incurs a lower level of operational risk than the traditional supply chain. We have shown that if the service fees by banks are sufficiently high, adopting blockchain technology is a mean-risk dominating policy which brings a higher expected profit and a lower risk for the supply chain and its members. For robustness checking, we examine other commonly seen supply chain contracts and alternative risk measures, and analytically reveal that the results remain valid.