Firms that source from offshore plants frequently perceive the lack of reliability and flexibility to be among the major drawbacks of their strategy. To mitigate against imminent mismatches of uncertain supply and demand, establishing capacity hedges in the form of responsive backup suppliers is...

This paper addresses the issue of identifying and assessing risk relevant to production networks. The objective is to create a systematic, comprehensive record of the risks relevant to the planning of car manufacturer’s production networks and to analyze these risks. The paper also discusses...

Operations management aims to match the supply with demand of material flows, whereas corporate finance seeks to match the supply with demand of monetary flows. These two supply–demand matching processes are connected by real investment and revenue management in a “closed-loop” of...

The public debate in Europe is turning against business because outsourcing and off-shoring are perceived to destroy jobs, and corporate profitability is seen as inconsistent with a wage stagnation of salaried employees. Managers in Europe feel surrounded by hostile regulation, protected product...

Increasing product variety through the use of alternate package sizes is a commonly observed mechanism in the grocery industry. Under such a scheme, however, the response to pricing decisions for each of the different package sizes is affected by how customers make demand choices. We build a...

Investment is a central theme in economics, finance, and operational research. Traditionally, the focus of analysis has been either on assessing the value of flexibility (investment under uncertainty) or on describing commitment effects in competitive settings (industrial organization). Research...

Coordination among many interdependent actors in complex product development projects is recognized as a key activity in organizational theory. It is well known that this coordination becomes progressively more difficult with project size, but we do not yet sufficiently understand whether this...

Managerial flexibility has value in the context of uncertain R...D projects, as management can repeatedly gather information about uncertain project and market characteristics and, based on this information, change its course of action. This value is now well accepted and referred to as "real...