Price Versus Production Postponement: Capacity and Competition
比较了企业在需求不确定时，选择价格延迟或生产延迟策略对产能投资、库存和利润的影响，发现价格延迟能降低决策对不确定性的敏感度，且竞争加剧时运营延迟的价值更高。
This article presents a comparative analysis of possible postponement strategies in a two-stage decision model where firms make three decisions: capacity investment, production (inventory) quantity, and price. Typically, investments are made while the demand curve is uncertain. The strategies differ in the timing of the operational decisions relative to the realization of uncertainty. We show how competition, uncertainty, and the timing of operational decisions influence the strategic investment decision of the firm and its value. In contrast to production postponement, price postponement makes the investment and production (inventory) decisions relatively insensitive to uncertainty. This suggests that managers can make optimal capacity decisions by deterministic reasoning if they have some price flexibility. Under price postponement, additional postponement of production has relatively small incremental value. Therefore, it may be worthwhile to consider flexible ex-post pricing before production postponement reengineering. While more postponement increases firm value, it is counterintuitive that this also makes the optimal capacity decision more sensitive to uncertainty. We highlight the different impact of more timely information, which leads to higher investment and inventories, and of reduced demand uncertainty, which decreases investment and inventories. Our analysis suggests appropriateness conditions for simple make-to-stock and make-to-order strategies. We also present technical sufficiency and uniqueness conditions. Under price postponement, these results extend to oligopolistic and perfect competition for which pure equilibria are derived. Interestingly, the relative value of operational postponement techniques seems to increase as the industry becomes more competitive.