Title: Essays on supply chain finance
Authors: Wu, Kekun (吳克坤)
Abstract: This thesis mainly studies two financing problems in the context of supply
chain management. The first problem is motivated by a major agricultural
firm's practice in China. We consider an agribusiness model called
firm+farmers". We aim to build a theoretical foundation for this kind
of business models that have attracted growing attention from the industry,
government, and the farmers in developing economies such as China.
The involving firm offers a revenue-sharing contract to a large number of
farmers, many of whom are tiny in nature. The farmers, based on their
expected returns and risks, choose to accept or reject the contracts. Our
model is distinguished from the previous literature on contract farming and
agricultural operations management in the following way. The contract on
the one hand retains a revenue sharing mechanism between the firm and
the farmers, and on the other hand guarantees a minimum payment to the
farmers. Thus, neither the firm nor the farmers bear full production and
market risks but the firm takes greater risks. We analyze the optimal supply
chain decisions for the firm and the farmers under such contracts. We
show how the business model provides financing benefits to both the firm
and the farmers that may otherwise not be accessible for them. We explain
how the pooling effect may influence the supply chain decisions and
performance. Our results address for the first time that how such hybrid
contracts may shape the agricultural supply chain and help drive sustainable development, and uncover the underling theoretical mechanism and
merits behind the apparent success of these agribusinesses.
In the second problem, we study a capacity procurement problem faced
by a shipping company whose financial resource is costly. We propose a
capacity-cost sharing scheme, which, commonly observed in the industry,
is to allow the company to share the capacity and the procurement cost
of a ship. A first-price auction is implemented to assist the company in
determining the percentage of capacity and cost to share. Our analysis
shows that first-price auction yields more revenue compared to a secondprice
auction, which is distinct from the previous work on auction. The
essay contributes to the theory of auction in that the the bidder's signal
space has more than one dimension. We use isobid curves to reduce the
dimensionality of the signal space. An efficient heuristic is designed to
compute the bidder's equilibrium bids numerically.
Notes: CityU Call Number: HD38.5 .W77 2013; ix, 87 p. : ill. 30 cm.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2013.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-87)
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