Optimal Operation and Financing Decisions in Green Supply Chain with a Capital-Constrained Manufacturer

Capital constraint, immensely existing in practice, became major stressors for manufacturers during the green research and development (R & D) triggered by managers integrating green concept into their business models. Considering the initial capital of a capital-constrained manufacturer, this paper formulates a Stackelberg game model comprising a manufacturer and a retailer, to discuss the optimal operation and financing decisions under the bank financing channel and trade credit financing channel, to detect the relationship between the manufacturer’s initial capital and green R & D investment, and to find which financing channel is better by comparing the two financing channels when the same initial capital is set. According to the above analysis, the results find that the capital-constrained manufacturer prefers financing only when meeting certain conditions. Furthermore, financing might be detrimental to the manufacturer but always beneficial to the retailer. Especially, under trade credit financing channel, the profit improvement of the retailer is higher than the manufacturer in the same financing channel, which suggests that the retailer has strong internal motivation to cooperate with the manufacturer from the perspective of financing.