Small retailers usually face difficulties in obtaining bank loans due to inadequate credit history. Traditional commercial loan can be very costly or even unavailable to such retailers. In order to promote the collaboration of the supply chain to gain the mutual interest of all the parties, larger suppliers are generally willing to intermediate between retailers and commercial institutions. In this paper, the proper scheme and its efficiency of supplier intermediation in retailer financing are carefully investigated for the case of existing unreliable products. By building a Stackelberg game model, we show that the supplier intermediated financing scheme can significantly improve the supply chain partners’ profits. Furthermore, with an elaborate numerical analysis, we demonstrate that the retailer will be motivated to choose the financing strategy only when the loan interest rate is less than a certain threshold. Finally, we explore how the compensation for product defect influences the supply chain partners’ optimal strategies and profits, which show that the proper compensation can realize Pareto improvement of the supply chain.

小型零售商通常由于信用记录不足而难以获得银行贷款。传统的商业贷款可能非常昂贵，甚至无法为这类零售商获得。为了促进供应链的协作以获得各方的共同利益，较大的供应商通常愿意在零售商和商业机构之间进行中介。本文针对存在不可靠产品的情况，仔细研究了零售商融资中供应商中介的适当方案及其效率。通过建立Stackelberg博弈模型，我们证明了供应商中间融资方案可以显着提高供应链合作伙伴的利润。此外，通过详尽的数值分析，我们证明，只有当贷款利率低于某个特定阈值时，零售商才会被激励选择融资策略。最后，我们探讨了产品缺陷的赔偿如何影响供应链合作伙伴的最优策略和利润，这表明适当的赔偿可以实现帕累托对供应链的改善。