Competitive Options, Supply Contracting, and Electronic Markets
构建了一个整合合同采购与现货市场的B2B交易框架，分析买方与多个卖方在容量期权和远期合同下的最优组合及市场均衡定价，揭示了管理灵活性的价值。
This paper develops a framework for analyzing business-to-business (B2B) transactions and supply chain management based on integrating contract procurement markets with spot markets using capacity options and forwards. The framework is motivated by the emergence of B2B exchanges in several industrial sectors to facilitate such integrated contract and spot procurement. In the framework developed, a buyer and multiple sellers may either contract for delivery in advance (the “contracting” option) or they may buy and sell some or all of their input/output in a spot market. Contract pricing involves both a reservation fee per unit of capacity and an execution fee per unit of output if capacity is called. The key question addressed is the structure of the optimal portfolios of contracting and spot market transactions for the buyer and these sellers, and the pricing thereof in market equilibrium. Existence and structure of market equilibria are characterized for the associated competitive game between sellers with heterogeneous technologies, under the assumption that they know the buyer's demand function. This allows an explicit characterization of the price of capacity options and the value of managerial flexibility, as well as providing conditions under which B2B exchanges are efficient and sustainable.