Complementarities in automobile production
研究北美汽车制造商如何通过柔性技术和内部化外包活动来降低因车型多样化带来的生产率损失，对产业组织和汽车行业研究者有参考价值。
Abstract The number of different car and light truck models produced in North America has increased enormously over the last decades. The data suggests that producing this increased variety of vehicles is associated with a productivity penalty. We show that manufacturers can adopt complementary activities to reduce this penalty. Flexible technology, defined as the ability to assemble models derived from different ‘platforms’ on the same assembly line, and bringing previously outsourced activities in‐house are two such activities that we identify. Both are costly themselves, in terms of lower productivity, but they reduce the cost of producing greater variety. The results are robust to controlling for the endogeneity of the adoption decisions using activity‐specific instruments, as proposed by Athey and Stern ( 2003 ). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.