Risk aversion, generalized correlation and investment in manufacturing capacities
研究了产品需求相关性和风险如何影响风险厌恶或风险中性决策者对专用和柔性制造产能的投资价值，发现广义相关性增加会降低两类产能价值，但柔性产能即使在需求完全正相关时仍可能有价值。
Abstract This study analyzes the relationship between product demand correlation and risk on the investment in dedicated and flexible manufacturing capacities. It is proved that for a risk averse (or risk neutral) decision‐maker, increased generalized correlation between output demands reduces the values of both dedicated and flexible manufacturing investments for all multivariate distributions. It is shown that no such monotonic relationship generally exists for the capacities themselves because of an economic tradeoff between risk and return. It is also proved that increased generalized correlation reduces the value of flexible capacity relative to dedicated capacity for the risk‐neutral decision maker. However, contrary to the extant literature, flexible capacity is still shown to be potentially valuable even if product demands are perfectly positively correlated. Finally, it is shown that increases in the risk of product demand, holding correlation (of product demand) constant, reduces the value of the investment in manufacturing capacities when output demands are either jointly normal or independent.