On the Learning Benefits of Resource Flexibility

Jiri Chod (), Mihalis G. Markakis () and Nikolaos Trichakis ()
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Jiri Chod: Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02467
Mihalis G. Markakis: Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa (IESE) Business School, University of Navarra, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
Nikolaos Trichakis: MIT Operations Research Center and Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142

Management Science, 2021, vol. 67, issue 10, 6513-6528

Abstract: 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 better-informed 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.

Keywords: flexibility; learning; risk pooling; censoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:67:y:2021:i:10:p:6513-6528

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