The Make-or-Buy Decision in the Presence of a Rival: Strategic Outsourcing to a Common Supplier
研究当垄断供应商同时服务零售竞争对手时，企业为何可能以高于自产成本的价格购买关键投入品，通过战略外包提高对手成本。
Firms routinely decide whether to make essential inputs themselves or buy the inputs from independent suppliers. Conventional wisdom suggests that a firm will not buy an input for a price above its in-house cost of production. We show that this is not necessarily the case when a monopolistic input supplier also serves the firm's retail rival. In this case, the decision to buy the input (and thus become one of the supplier's customers) can limit the incentive the supplier would otherwise have to provide the input on particularly favorable terms to the retail rival. Thus, a retail competitor may pay a premium to outsource production to a common supplier in order to raise its rivals' costs.