On the Learning Benefits of Resource Flexibility

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chod, Jiri; Markakis, Mihalis G.; Trichakis, Nikolaos
• 署名单位: Boston College; University of Navarra; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3795
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 6513-6528
• 关键词: flexibility; learning; Risk pooling; censoring

摘要

Resource flexibility, arguably among the most celebrated operational concepts, is known to provide firms facing demand uncertainty with such benefits as risk pooling, revenue-maximization optionality, and operational hedging. In this paper, we uncover a heretofore unknown benefit: we establish that resource flexibility facilitates learning the demand when the latter is censored, which could, in turn, enable firms to make betterinformed future operational decisions, thereby increasing profitability. Further, we quantify these learning benefits of flexibility and find that they could be of the same order of magnitude as the extensively studied risk- pooling benefits of flexibility. This suggests that flexibility's learning benefits could be a first-order consideration and that extant theories, which view flexibility only as the ability to act ex post, could be underestimating its true value when learning the demand is desirable, for example, when it enables managers to make better ex ante capacity, assortment, or pricing decisions in future periods.