Guilt by Association: Strategic Failure Prevention and Recovery Capacity Investments
研究了多个企业分别负责不同子系统时，在故障预防和恢复能力投资上的策略选择，发现分散决策会导致过度投资恢复能力而忽视预防，降低系统可用性。
We examine technological systems that display the following characteristics: (i) unplanned outages incur significant costs, (ii) the system experiences an outage if one or more of its subsystems fails, (iii) subsystem failures may occur simultaneously, and (iv) subsystem recovery requires specific resources and capabilities that are provided by different firms. Firms may invest in two measures to enhance system availability—namely, failure prevention and recovery capacity. If recovery capacity investment is the only option, we find that the firms in a decentralized setting overinvest in capacity, resulting in higher system availability but at a higher cost. If both investments can be made, we find that the firms underinvest in failure prevention and overinvest in recovery capacity. That is, firms in a decentralized setting shift their focus from preventing failures to responding to failures. The net effect is lower system availability, reversing the conclusion above. We also find that, unexpectedly, firms are more willing to let their subsystems fail if a joint failure is more likely to occur. This paper was accepted by Martin Lariviere, operations management.