The Cyclical Behavior of Inventories and Unfilled Orders

库存和未履行订单的周期性行为

• 批准号: 9210334
• 负责人: James Kahn
• 金额: $ 10.5万
• 依托单位: University of Rochester
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 1992
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1992-07-15 至 1995-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9210334&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Cyclical; Behavior; Inventories; Unfilled; Orders

This project carries out research on the behavior of inventories and unfilled orders. The contributions of this research to this line of work are important because unfilled orders play a very significant role in business cycles and in the overall volatility of national output, yet there is relatively little empirical research on unfilled orders and there is no adequate theoretical explanation of the reasons why unfilled orders and inventories are positively correlated. One would think that increases in inventories would reduce unfilled orders, but that is not what the preliminary evidence shows. The research builds on earlier work on the stockout-avoidance motive for inventories in two main directions: First, it extends the stockout-avoidance model to allow for strictly convex costs of production and inventory holding. Second, it incorporates the joint determination of inventories and unfilled orders. This is useful not only for those industries in which orders data are available. Many industries (most notably the automobile industry) are known to have orders, but data on them are not available. Consequently current sales or shipments partly reflect unmeasured unfilled orders. The model developed will resolve this problem. The project also explores some new evidence of increasing marginal cost and extends the stockout-avoidance model to allow for it. Because the model is not linear-quadratic, and it explicitly incorporates non-negativity constraints on inventories, this extension is non-trivial and leads to the use of some numerical methods that may themselves be of independent interest. Preliminary work focused on evidence related to the slope of marginal cost. The extreme sensitivity of inventory behavior in the model to small departures from zero marginal cost suggests that marginal cost may be very close to flat.

该项目对库存和未完成订单的行为进行了研究。这项研究对这一领域的贡献非常重要，因为未完成订单在商业周期和国家产出的整体波动性中发挥着非常重要的作用，但对未完成订单的实证研究相对较少，也没有充分的理论解释来解释未完成订单与库存正相关的原因。人们可能会认为，库存增加会减少未完成订单，但初步证据显示并非如此。这项研究建立在两个主要方向的库存避免缺货动机的早期工作的基础上：第一，它扩展了缺货避免模型，以考虑生产和库存持有的严格凸性成本。其次，它包含了对库存和未完成订单的联合确定。这不仅对那些有订单数据的行业有用。众所周知，许多行业(最著名的是汽车行业)都有订单，但没有关于这些订单的数据。因此，目前的销售或发货量在一定程度上反映了未计量的未完成订单。开发的模型将解决这个问题。该项目还探索了边际成本增加的一些新证据，并扩展了缺货-避免模型以允许这种情况。由于该模型不是线性二次型的，而且它明确地包含了对库存的非负性约束，所以这种扩展是不平凡的，并导致使用一些本身可能是独立感兴趣的数值方法。初步工作集中在与边际成本斜率有关的证据上。模型中的库存行为对零边际成本的微小偏离非常敏感，这表明边际成本可能非常接近于持平。