Managing default risk under trade credit: Who should implement Big-Data analytics in supply chains?

This paper considers a supplier-retailer channel in which providing trade credit to customers incurs default risk. Big-data analytics (BD-A) could be used to mitigate default risk. The aim is to identify the party that should implement BD-A in the supply chain. Our results indicate that when the retailer (supplier) is dominant in determining the credit period, the retailer (supplier) prefers to implement BD-A unilaterally if the optimal BD-A effort is higher than a threshold. The credit period, quantities ordered, and BD-A effort increase when BD-A effort cost is shared.