Consumer credit strategy in green supply chain with heterogeneity of consumers

To explore the role of consumer credit in alleviating consumer capital pressure and to increase the demand of green products,on the basis of considering the consumers' heterogeneous preferences for consumer credit,the Stackelberg models under three strategies:immediate payment (N strategy),consumer credit provided by bank (BF strategy),and consumer credit provided by retailer (RF strategy) were constructed aiming at a green supply chain composed of a manufacturer and a retailer.The results of analysis showed that the green investment behavior of the manufacturer helped consumers obtain a lower credit rate;the retailer would set the highest credit rate and lower the retail price under RF strategy,and this behavior was beneficial to channel members and consumers;N strategy was the optimal strategy for channel members when consumer capital constraints were low.Otherwise,the two consumer credit strategies were better.Specially,if the upper limit of consumer credit rates was higher,the RF strategy was the optimal strategy for channel members.Otherwise,the BF strategy was the best.On this basis,the model was extended to the mixed strategy.Through numerical analysis,the influence of immediate payment acceptance and credit cycle on the preference of credit strategies of channel members was discussed.The results showed that under certain conditions,consumer credit was beneficial to the market demand of green products and the profit of channel members. © 2023 CIMS. All rights reserved.