Abstract: Governments and businesses have started to place more emphasis on recycling and remanufacturing due to the growing severity of resource scarcity and environmental pollution issues. Some manufacturing enterprises, such as Samsung, Huawei, and Hewlett-Packard, collect used products through professional third-party recyclers, process them into remanufactured products, and put them on the market for secondary sales. This helps to reduce environmental pollution and alleviate the problem with resource shortage. For the complex closed-loop supply chain consisting of the manufacturer, the third-party recycler, and the retailer, in the event of a shortage of capital for the retailer, the decision-making of each member will be affected by the extent of the retailer's shortage of funds and financing modes. The retailer with limited capital can finance itself to address the issue of capital shortage by applying for a bank loan or asking supply chain participants for financial support through paid deferred payment. Therefore, in a closed-loop supply chain with a capital-constrained retailer, a thorough investigation into the financing mechanisms that are more advantageous to them and other supply chain participants is required.
For a closed-loop supply chain consisting of a manufacturer, a capital-constrained retailer, and a third-party recycler, considering that the capital-constrained retailer can choose to finance from the manufacturer (internal finance) or the bank (external finance), this paper studies the financing modes for the closed-loop supply chain. First, the revenue functions of the retailer, the third-party recycler, the manufacturer, and the closed-loop supply chain under the two financing modes are constructed. Then the optimal solutions under different financing modes are solved based on the idea of the Stackelberg game. Finally, the optimal financing mode from different perspectives is given by comparing the optimal decision on prices and return rates, as well as supply chain members' revenues under different financing modes.
It is found that the transfer price and lending rate affect the optimal decisions on pricing and optimal return rate of the closed-loop supply chain to a certain extent. The optimal pricing and return rate of the closed-loop supply chain is independent of the amount of initial capital of the retailer when the loan interest rate is exogenously given. The results also show that the recycling difficulty of used products and the lending rate affect the financing mode choice strategy heavily: when the lending rates of the two financing modes are equal, then the internal financing will be more favorable to the manufacturer, retailer, and third-party recycler if the difficulty of recycling used goods is high, whereas the external financing will be more favorable to the retailer and the third-party recycler if the difficulty of recycling used goods is low.
By studying the closed-loop supply chain financing model selection strategy considering third-party recycling and retailer capital constraint this paper not only provides modeling and methodological support for solving the optimal operation decision problem and the financing strategy selection problem of the closed-loop supply chain under different financing modes, but also enriches the existing research results. In this paper, to focus on the closed-loop supply chain financing mode selection strategy, the closed-loop supply chain pricing and recovery rate decision-making models constructed under different financing modes are based on non-random demand. However, in reality, market demand is usually stochastic, and faced with demand uncertainty, so decision makers will show various levels of risk preference. Therefore, future research could investigate the choice of the financing model for retailers' capital-constrained closed-loop supply chains in a stochastic demand environment. It also could be interesting to study the impact of chain members' risk attitudes on the recycling and remanufacturing strategies, and financing strategies of the closed-loop supply chain.

Key words: close-loop supply chain, retailer capital constraint, third-party recycling, financing mode selection, Stackelberg game

摘要： 针对由制造商、资金约束的零售商和第三方回收商构成的闭环供应链,考虑资金约束的零售商可以选择向制造商融资(内容融资)或者向银行融资(外部融资),研究了闭环供应链的融资模式选择问题。首先,分别构建两种模式下零售商、第三方回收商、制造商和闭环供应链的收益函数;然后依据Stackelberg博弈求解不同融资模式下的最优解;最后对比分析不同融资模式下最优价格、回收率和供应链成员企业的收益函数,给出最优融资模式。研究发现转移价格与贷款利率在一定程度上影响闭环供应链的最优定价和最优回收率,且当贷款利率外生给定不随融资规模的大小而有所不同时,闭环供应链最优定价和最优回收率与零售商初始资金量多少无关。研究结果还表明,废旧品回收难度和贷款利率对融资模式选择具有重要影响。

关键词: 闭环供应链, 零售商资金约束, 第三方回收, 融资模式选择, Stackelberg博弈