Operations strategy for supply chain finance with asset-backed securitization: Centralization and blockchain adoption

Supply chain finance (SCF) is a set of financing processes and technology-based business that links supply chain members, in which innovative financial products and technologies, i.e., asset-backed securitization (ABS) and blockchain, have been widely adopted. We use a game-theoretic approach to study the operations strategy for SCF with ABS. More precisely, we explore the issue of centralization, that is, whether a retailer, as a core company in a decentralized supply chain system, should establish her own originated channel, and the impacts of the blockchain adoption on supply chain systems. We find that the core company should not establish her own originated channel when her main business is to sell high-cost products or when the marginal cost of blockchain implementation is sufficiently large. Besides, when the core company builds her own originated channel, the manufacturer should decrease the wholesale price, but the core company should increase the retail price under certain conditions. Interestingly, both the service rate and interest rate in the financing channel remain unchanged. In addition, we find that the impacts of the blockchain technology on the wholesale price, retail price, and discount of the fund depend on the production cost. However, both the service rate and interest rate always decline when the blockchain technology is introduced, because the market becomes more creditable. Moreover, in both decentralized and centralized systems, all supply chain members’ profits are increased if the marginal cost of the blockchain technology is sufficiently low.