Market Preferences and Process Selection: The Value of Perfect Flexibility

In this paper we investigate the selection of process technologies under conditions of stochastic market preferences. We assume that the market evolves over time through m states or scenarios defined by the preferences of the market. In response to this evolving marketplace, a producer can respond by switching its facilities to one of t technological states defined by plant capabilities. We model the evolution of market preferences and policies for process selection as a Markov Decision Process and find optimal process adoption policies. In addition to optimal strategies, we define two alternative adoption strategies. “Perfect flexibility” is defined as the increase in profit that can be obtained by instantly matching process technologies to changes in market preferences, compared to a “robust” policy of selecting and employing only a single process technology. With an objective of profit maximization, we show that when the cost of switching production processes is very high, the optimal policy is to select a single robust process and to never switch from it. In contrast, when process-switching costs are zero we show that the optimal policy is perfect flexibility where production processes are immediately matched to market preferences. An optimal production policy provably exists between these two extreme policies. We define the expected value of perfect flexibility as the difference in expected profits between a perfectly flexible policy and a robust policy. The expected value of perfect flexibility provides an upper bound to the benefit of process switching and product flexibility when market preferences are uncertain. Several numerical examples illustrate our findings.