Production Smoothing and the Bullwhip Effect
提出新的生产平滑度量指标，基于汽车制造数据发现，尽管99%的产品存在牛鞭效应，但75%的产品仍实现了至少5%的生产平滑，表明两者并非对立。
The bullwhip effect and production smoothing appear antithetical because their empirical tests oppose one another: production variability exceeding sales variability for bullwhip, and vice versa for smoothing. But this is a false dichotomy. We distinguish between the phenomena with a new production smoothing measure, which estimates how much more variable production would be absent production volatility costs. We apply our metric to an automotive manufacturing sample comprising 162 car models and find 75% smooth production by at least 5%, despite the fact that 99% exhibit the bullwhip effect. Indeed, we estimate both a strong bullwhip (on average, production is 220% as variable as sales) and robust smoothing (on average, production would be 22% more variable without deliberate stabilization). We find firms smooth both production variability and production uncertainty. We measure production smoothing with a structural econometric production scheduling model, based on the generalized order-up-to policy.