Achieving Efficiency in Capacity Procurement

Abstract

This chapter studies a capacity procurement problem in which a buyer meets an uncertain demand using a combination of spot purchases and supply options that are offered by a number of competing suppliers. The specific setting we consider involves the suppliers each owning a block of capacity and the buyer restricted to reserving the entire block or none. For this setting, we are interested in understanding the buyer’s optimal procurement strategy and the suppliers’ competitive bidding behavior in the supply option market. To this end, we first examine the buyer’s optimal decision given a set of supply options, and then study the suppliers’ optimal bidding strategies in equilibrium. We find t..