关键词: 资金约束, 零售商, 采购策略, 采购时机

Abstract: In recent years, the interfaces of enterprises' operational and financial decisions have received substantial attentions in academia. Among them, the "capital-constrained newsvendor" (CCNV) problem which focuses on studying the impacts of liquidity constraints on retailers' inventory policies is widely concerned. With a random price-dependent market demand, the capital-constrained retailer's integrated purchase timing, quantity, and financing decisions under two different decision-making objectives, i.e. expected-profit-maximizing and default-rate-minimizing, are respectively studied.The simplest supply chain structure comprising one supplier and one retailer is examined. The retailer is assumed to be capital-constrained (its internal capital is not enough to afford the optimal orders), but it can borrow from banks to fulfill its purchasing. The supplier offers two purchase time windows to the retailer, i.e. "early-purchasing during the lead time with a lower price but high demand uncertainty" and "late-purchasing at the beginning of the selling season with a higher price but no demand uncertainty". In each purchase time window, the retailer's optimal purchase quantity and the corresponding financing policies are studied under two different decision-making objectives respectively. On this basis, the optimal purchase timing policies are investigated under each objective and the differences between the policies are highlighted. Some main conclusions of this research are summarized as follows.(a) In the case of early-purchasing, the retailer's optimal purchase quantity and corresponding financing policies are different under two proposed decision-making objectives, while its policies under these objectives are the same in the case of late-purchasing. Furthermore, a default-rate-minimizing objective may induce some loss of expected profit in early-purchasing and the loss is decreasing with the retailer's internal capital level.(b) Under an expected-profit-maximizing objective, the retailer can conditionally obtain an "information bonus" in late-purchasing, while it will bear a higher wholesale price. Thus, it needs a trade-off between the "conditional information bonus" and the "inevitable cost loss" in late-purchasing, and then makes the optimal purchase timing decision. A multi-parameter based method is proposed to solve the timing decision problem. On the other hand, under a default-rate-minimizing objective, the retailer's timing decision is indifferent since it can always achieve a zero default rate by performing appropriate quantity strategies in both purchase time windows.

Key words: capital-constrained, retailer, purchase policy, purchase timing