Optimal Flexibility Configurations in Newsvendor Networks: Going Beyond Chaining and Pairing
研究了资源组合投资中能力与灵活性技术选择问题，提出集合论方法分析多产品并行资源网络，证明灵活性递减回报，最优组合仅投资于相邻两个灵活性层级，并可作为理论基准。
We study the classical problem of capacity and flexible technology selection with a newsvendor network model of resource portfolio investment. The resources differ by their level of flexibility, where “level-k flexibility” refers to the ability to process k different product types. We present an exact set-theoretic methodology to analyze newsvendor networks with multiple products and parallel resources. This simple approach is sufficiently powerful to prove that (i) flexibility exhibits decreasing returns and (ii) the optimal portfolio will invest in at most two, adjacent levels of flexibility in symmetric systems, and to characterize (iii) the optimal flexibility configuration for asymmetric systems as well. The optimal flexibility configuration can serve as a theoretical performance benchmark for other configurations suggested in the literature. For example, although chaining is not optimal in our setting, the gap is small and the inclusion of scale economies quickly favors chaining over pairing. We also demonstrate how this methodology can be applied to other settings such as product substitution and queuing systems with parameter uncertainty.