Capacity Investment Under Postponement Strategies, Market Competition, and Demand Uncertainty
Capacity Investment Under Postponement Strategies, Market Competition, and Demand Uncertainty
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DOI：
10.1287/mnsc.1080.0940
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发表时间：
2008-11
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Ravi Anupindi;Li Jiang
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Ravi Anupindi;Li Jiang
我们考虑双寡头模型，企业在需求不确定的情况下对产能、产量和价格做出决策。容量和价格的决定，分别是事前和事后的需求实现。需求实现时机与生产决策的相互作用赋予了企业不同的能力。灵活的企业可以推迟生产决策，直到观察到实际的需求曲线，但不灵活的企业不能。在一般需求结构和成本函数下，我们刻画了对称双寡头垄断的均衡，并建立了企业柔性时价格竞争和数量竞争的战略等价性。我们研究了容量和利润的随机序性质，并表明当市场波动较大时，灵活公司的容量和利润都会增加。我们发现，灵活性允许一个公司增加投资的能力，赚取更高的利润，同时使客户受益的价格保持在一个较窄的范围内，战略等价意味着这些属性是强大的市场竞争。我们还表明，灵活性发挥了重要作用，在减轻竞争的破坏性影响时，需求冲击是加性的，破坏性的影响是不存在的企业面临乘性的需求冲击。当柔性决策是内生的时，企业的战略柔性选择取决于技术成本和需求冲击的性质。特别是，面对一个乘法的需求冲击，企业总是选择是不灵活的，而所有可能的均衡下观察加法的需求冲击。
We consider duopoly models where firms make decisions on capacity, production, and price under demand uncertainty. Capacity and price decisions are made, respectively, ex ante and ex post demand realizations. The interplay between the timings of demand realization and production decision endows firms with different capabilities. Flexible firms can postpone production decisions until the actual demand curve is observed, but inflexible firms cannot. Under general demand structures and cost functions, we characterize the equilibrium for a symmetric duopoly and establish the strategic equivalence of price and quantity competitions when firms are flexible. We investigate the stochastic order properties of capacity and profit and show that they both increase for a flexible firm when the market is more volatile. We find that flexibility allows a firm to increase investment in capacity and earn a higher profit while benefiting customers by keeping the price in a narrower range; strategic equivalence implies that these properties are robust to market conjectures. We also show that flexibility plays an important role in mitigating the destructive effect of competition when the demand shock is additive; the destructive effect is nonexistent for firms facing multiplicative demand shock. When flexibility decision is endogenous, a firm's strategic flexibility choice depends on the cost of technology as well as the nature of demand shock. In particular, faced with a multiplicative demand shock, firms always choose to be inflexible, whereas all the possible equilibria are observed under additive demand shocks.