Payment Terms and Trade Credit in Supply Chains

Initial Situation and Objectives

Operational events such as ordering, delivery, goods receipt, and quality inspection are increasingly being tracked digitally and in near real time within supply chains. Payments, on the other hand, are often made weeks or months later. This temporal decoupling is not merely a technical shortcoming: payment terms and trade credit can support financing, risk allocation, auditing, bargaining power, and relationship management, while simultaneously shifting liquidity and financing burdens among stakeholders.
To date, there has been no integrated explanation of which intentional, administrative, strategic, frictional, and financialized mechanisms cause the delay in financial flows and how buyers, suppliers, banks, and platforms evaluate these mechanisms differently.
The aim of this study is to empirically examine the mechanisms of temporal decoupling between financial and operational flows and to derive from this an explanatory model with policy implications for SCF.

Possible Research Questions

FF1: What mechanisms cause payments to remain delayed despite digitally visible operational events?
FF2: How do the perceptions, interests, and scope for action differ among buyers, suppliers, financial service providers, and platform providers?
RF3: What financial, operational, and relational effects result from different forms of payment delays?
RF4: Under what conditions can payments be accelerated, and when is a temporal decoupling functionally or strategically desirable?

Methodological Approach

• Literature review on payment terms, trade credit, delayed payments, and supply chain finance.
• Further development of a preliminary delay framework and a stakeholder-specific interview guide.
• Conducting and qualitatively analyzing approximately twelve to sixteen semi-structured expert interviews with several stakeholder groups.
• Abductive, case-comparative analysis of the identified mechanisms, as well as theory-driven interpretation, for example, from principal-agent, system, or information-processing perspectives.

Expected Results

• Empirically validated typology or mechanism model of payment delays.
• Comparison of stakeholder perspectives, conflicting goals, and causal relationships.
• Design principles for SCF solutions, data integration, and the temporal alignment of financial and operational flows.

We offer you

• Structured guidance and regular professional exchange.
• Support with systematic literature reviews, qualitative research, and academic writing.
• Access to pre-processed research findings, literature corpora, and methodological groundwork, to the extent that they are relevant to the topic.
• The opportunity to contribute to a joint publication, provided your academic contribution meets the necessary standards.
• Well-structured templates for efficient writing.

What you bring to the table

• Independence, motivation, and an interest in an interdisciplinary research topic.
• Strong academic performance and a structured approach to work.
• Interest in supply chain finance, trade credit, working capital, and qualitative research.
• Willingness to independently identify, conduct, and analyze expert interviews.

Supervision and Application

The thesis will be supervised by the Chair of Business Logistics (LFO) at TU Dortmund University. If you are interested, please send your most recent transcripts, a brief application letter with your resume, and three suggested dates for an initial interview.