Sourcing under incomplete information and negative capacity-cost correlation
研究了买方在供应商产能为私有信息且产能越大单位成本越低（规模经济）时，如何决定预订产能和供应商数量，发现产能与成本负相关会导致供应商数量减少。
We study a sourcing problem where a buyer reserves capacity from a set of suppliers. The suppliers have finite capacity and their unit production cost is a decreasing function of their capacity, implying scale economies. The capacity of each supplier and therefore the cost is his private information. The buyer and other suppliers only know the probability distribution of the supplier’s capacity. The buyer’s demand is random and she has to decide how much capacity to reserve in advance from a subset of suppliers and how much to source from marketplace. In this study we determine the buyer’s optimum reservation quantity and the size of the supply base. We find the presence of such capacity cost correlation leads to supply base reduction.