Production and Capacity Management with Internal Financing
研究一个仅依赖内部融资的公司在随机市场环境下如何管理生产和产能，发现内部融资会在两个独立运营的设施间产生溢出效应，并改变最优投资和分红决策。
We formulate and analyze a stylized dynamic model of a price-taking firm that manages production and capacity, uses only internal financing, and faces stochastic market environments. The firm has two operationally independent production facilities, each of which makes two products, and a cash reserve that finances all operations and dividend issuance. Each period the firm chooses the amount of dividend to issue, and at each facility it chooses production quantities and amounts of capacity to augment or divest. Relevant market data are exogenous and evolve stochastically. We completely characterize the optimal policy and the endogenous values of the capacities and cash reserve, and show that they invite a real-option interpretation. We find that internal financing creates a spillover between the endogenous values of the two operationally independent facilities, and we specify how this leads to interdependence of their optimal policies. We show that an “invest/stay put/divest” (ISD) policy remains optimal for partially irreversible investments, but internal financing changes the ISD thresholds. If the exogenous data are intertemporally independent, an internally financed firm is less likely to issue dividends or to expand capacity than if it were in a perfect capital market. As the market becomes more volatile, the endogenous values of capacities and cash increase, and the firm becomes more reluctant to issue dividends. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0655 . This paper has been accepted for the Manufacturing & Service Operations Management Special Issue on Interface of Finance, Operations, and Risk Management.