Small suppliers often face challenges to obtain financing for their operations. Especially in developing economies, traditional financing methods can be very costly or unavailable to such suppliers. To reduce channel costs, large buyers have recently begun implementing their own financing...

The bullwhip effect and production smoothing appear antithetical because their empirical tests oppose one another: production variability exceeding sales variability for bullwhip, and vice versa for smoothing. But this is a false dichotomy. We distinguish between the phenomena with a new...