Operational Flexibility and Financial Hedging: Complements or Substitutes?
研究企业在需求不确定下投资产能时，运营灵活性与金融对冲这两种风险缓解策略的关系，发现产品灵活性与金融对冲在需求正相关时互补、负相关时替代，而延期灵活性总是替代金融对冲。
We consider a firm that invests in capacity under demand uncertainty and thus faces two related but distinct types of risk: mismatch between capacity and demand and profit variability. Whereas mismatch risk can be mitigated with greater operational flexibility, profit variability can be reduced through financial hedging. We show that the relationship between these two risk mitigating strategies depends on the type of flexibility: Product flexibility and financial hedging tend to be complements (substitutes)—i.e., product flexibility tends to increase (decrease) the value of financial hedging, and, vice versa, financial hedging tends to increase (decrease) the value of product flexibility—when product demands are positively (negatively) correlated. In contrast to product flexibility, postponement flexibility is a substitute to financial hedging as intuitively expected. Although our analytical results assume perfect flexibility and perfect hedging and rely on a linear approximation of the value of hedging, we validate their robustness in an extensive numerical study.