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Top1. Introduction
Credit system (CS) refers to a social mechanism that acts specifically on the market norms of an economic development system. This mechanism establishes a new market rule, which enables the formation of social capital, directly guarantee the maturity of a market economy and expand the market scale of an economic development system (Duffie, 2019). Hence, the CS is of great benefit for the manufacturers, the suppliers, and even the consumers in a supply chain economic development system (Sharma & Patil, 2011; Xu et al., 2019). For example, Boeing, with continuous problems as 737 Max been grounded and shut down, has been successively downgraded by Moody's, a credit rating agency, to the lowest level of investment grade on January 30th, 2020. The agency expects that Boeing will take three years to recover its production and credit position.
Regarding the two kinds of CS construction ways, the industry regulation (IR) and the administrative supervision (AS), the organizations or supervisors in the CS construction can be roughly divided into two kinds, the manufacturers association (MA) (Shamir & Shin, 2018), like NAM, the American manufacturers association, and the administrative supervision department (ASD) (Cruces, 2006), like some government organizations with the right to reward and punish. IR refers to moral rules emphasizing integrity and self-discipline and reflecting the brain signals of human beings (King-Casas et al., 2005); AS refers to essential legal principles, emphasizing standard supervision and heteronomy (Goode, 1975). In the supply chain of big passenger aircraft, some experienced manufacturers like Airbus have established relatively perfect AS system to supervise their suppliers, which guarantees their smooth research and development process. However, some other manufacturers, like the COMAC who is newly established, without a perfect supplier supervision system, can just rely on IR to manage their supply chain.
It is very essential and practical work to find the connections and the differences between IR and AS. On the one hand, supervisors in a new supply chain management (SCM) system have found it very difficult to construct AS system as they cannot simply copy the existing and mature experiences. “So many differences exist between advanced and underdeveloped economies.” (Schirber, 1960) Hence, it is necessary for this kind of SCM systems to find the connections and the differences between their original IR and some successful AS. On the other hand, some successful SCM systems have not figured out which kind of CS they should pay more effort to, IR or AS, and what should be the equilibrium state (Malesky & Taussig, 2009). Hence, to find the connections and the differences between IR and AS can better help CS construction in SCM.
Our work makes the contributions to find the connections and the differences between the IR and the AS, and further is dedicated to the managerial implications on the construction of CS in the SCM. We make a new attempt at the consideration of the combined efforts of the supervisors and the manufacturer in our work considering the symmetry of decision-making behaviors between supervisors and manufacturer. Regarding the AS construction, the ASD should play as the leading role as it is usually in charge of formulating laws and regulations in a supply chain. Nevertheless, for the IR construction, the MA and the manufacturer are on a par because they supervise each other and execute the CS construction together. However, how to depict the efforts of the supervisors and the manufacturer respectively in different CS constructions is difficult but practical work for us. Another problem in our work is how to analyze the connections and the differences between the IR and the AS based on the efforts of the supervisors and the manufacturer.
In order to study the behaviors of the supervisors and the manufacturers considering their different roles in different CS constructions, we bend our efforts to solve the following problems with the application of game theory: (1) Which is better, IR or AS, regarding the CS construction in the SCM? (2) How many efforts do the supervisors and the manufacturer make in the constructions of the IR and the AS respectively? (3) Do the supervisors have to pay more than the manufacturer in the CS construction? With the comparisons between the constructions of the IR and the AS, and the efforts of the supervisors and the manufacturer in our work, we can get these problems solved. According to the results, our work is dedicated to giving implications about the effective ways to construct CS and giving the managers some inspirations about a reasonable cost on the AS construction considering their own IR system. The conceptual research framework for this paper is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Conceptual research framework