The role of voucher sale in advance for a capital-constrained supply chain

This paper studies voucher sale as an operational method to raise working capital for a supply chain, which consists of a supplier and a capital-constrained retailer. The retailer takes advantage of an online platform to sell vouchers and to get access to borrowing from a bank. By formulating a Stackelberg game model, we show the retailer's possible order quantities in the cases without and with bank loan and analyze the impact of voucher sale on the retailer's optimal choice of order quantity and the supplier's optimal wholesale price. We find that a smaller voucher's price induces the retailer to be more likely to order with loan from a bank while a larger voucher's value induces an order quantity with the loan more difficult to be repaid. In addition, if voucher's price is large, the supplier decides a wholesale price which leads the retailer not to borrow from a bank; and if voucher's price is small, the supplier's optimal decision is obtained by anticipating the retailer to borrow from a bank. We also analyze the impact of voucher sale in the presence of trade credit financing on the firms' decisions. The results show that the voucher's price should be small so that the large; otherwise, the retailer either does not borrow from the supplier or may not repay the supplier. Besides, the supplier decides a wholesale price so that the retailer does not borrow or can repay the supplier, except that the voucher's value is large and the voucher's price is medium.