Supply Chains and Segment Profitability: How Input Pricing Creates a Latent Cross-Segment Subsidy
建立模型，揭示当企业依赖自利供应商提供多细分市场共用的投入品时，批发价格取决于各细分市场的平均盈利能力，导致细分市场利润计算可能高估或低估其真实价值，企业有时应服务看似不盈利的市场或客户。
ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen an increased emphasis on developing more precise accounting measures of market- and customer-level profitability. By their very nature, such segment profitability measures may unwittingly neglect complementarities. Such complementarities have been widely recognized on the demand side due to brand recognition, predatory pricing, or interdependent products. We develop a model showing that important supply-side complementarities can also be prevalent. In particular, when a firm relies on a self-interested supplier for inputs used across multiple segments, the wholesale price it pays depends on the average profitability of its segments. Taking such interaction between upstream pricing and the firm’s downstream reach into account, the model shows that: (1) segment profit calculations can understate or overstate the value added by the segment depending on the segment’s relative contribution margin, and (2) the firm sometimes benefits from devoting resources to less profitable segments and perhaps even from serving seemingly unprofitable markets and/or customers.