关键词: 应收账款, 保理, 贴现, 资金约束, 线性规划

Abstract: The convention of selling on credit results in mass accumulation of accounts receivable on the firm's balance sheet. The financially constrained firm has no enough working capital to invest in accounts receivable and cover the production cost incurred during the credit period. To finance future business, the firm can employ factoring to advance cash from its accounts receivable, i.e., selling the accounts receivable to a financial institution (called a factor) at a discount. In such a financing scheme, the discrete-time dynamic inventory control problem with deterministic demand can be formulated as a linear program. Based on the structural property of this optimization problem, a novel and equivalent modelling approach is proposed to reduce the number of decision variables and constraint conditions. This new modelling approach is also applicable in the continuous-time case and mixed case, and can formulate the firm's problem as a continuous linear program. By replacing the functional (infinite-dimensional) decision variables with piece-wise constant functions, the continuous and mixed models can be converted into discretization (finite-dimensional) problems. The optimal solution of the discretization problem is a feasible and approximate optimal solution of the original optimization model. Finally, the numerical examples are conducted to analyze the impact of discount rate on the firm's profit.

Key words: accounts receivable, factoring, discount, capital constraint, linear program