Live-Streaming E-Commerce in a Capital-Constrained Dual-Channel Supply Chain: Pricing and Financing Decisions

Live-streaming e-commerce has become a vital channel for suppliers to expand online sales; however, many suppliers adopting it face capital constraints. This paper studies a dual-channel supply chain consisting of a capital-constrained supplier and a well-funded retailer, in which the supplier sells through an offline retail channel and an online live-streaming channel and can finance its production shortfall with a bank loan at an exogenous interest rate. Two live-streaming modes are considered: hiring a professional anchor, who receives a share of the online contribution margin and chooses the streaming effort, or self-streaming, in which the supplier exerts the effort himself; no ordering between the two effort technologies is imposed. For each mode, equilibrium pricing, effort, and financing decisions are derived for both of the supplier’s financing states; because the supplier’s initial capital determines which solution applies, the capital thresholds supporting each candidate equilibrium are identified, together with a boundary equilibrium between the two thresholds in which the loan is exactly zero and prices vary linearly with capital. We find that the offline demand is proportional to the offline price in every scenario and that the online demand obeys a companion identity, both following from the retailer’s pricing problem rather than from any general stability property of the supply chain. Once the supplier borrows, a higher interest rate raises both retail prices and widens the online–offline price gap; offline demand rises with the offline price, whereas online demand falls, since the higher prices outweigh the change in streaming effort, so that the retailer’s profit increases while the supplier’s profit decreases whenever the loan is sufficiently large. For the mode choice, the supplier compares its continuation profits under the correct financing regime for each mode. Hiring the anchor is optimal only when the anchor’s cost advantage is large enough or the margin share is favorable enough; no equal-efficiency restriction is needed for this comparison. These findings provide guidance for suppliers in live-streaming e-commerce on pricing and financing under capital pressure and on the choice between hiring a professional anchor and self-streaming.