Alianças Estratégicas como Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento da Capacidade Tecnológica: o Caso de Cinco Empresas do Setor Eletro-eletrônico Brasileiro

Intense competition has influenced firms to strength investments in strategic alliances worldwide in order to build up technological capability. In the case of Brazil, pressure to open markets and the internationalization of the competition has led companies to seek alternative forms of accelerating technological development. The aim of this paper is to look into how Brazilian companies manage to increase their technological capabilities by examining the factors that make them internationally competitive. In order to achieve this, three types of factors are analyzed: (1) intra-firm factors; (2) inter-firm strategic alliances; (3) factors that are external to the firm at five companies operating in the Brazilian electronics industry. We conclude that strategic alliances can speed up the technological capability development of firms possessing an initial absorptive capacity. Not all the people interviewed are of the same opinion as to how external factors, such as market characteristics and public policies, influence the development of technological capacity, and it is therefore not possible to reach a definite conclusion concerning a possible association with the other two factors. Future research should take a closer look at external factors in order to understand them better

Branch and Price Solution Approach for Order Acceptance and Capacity Planning in Make-to-Order Operations

The increasing emphasis on mass customization, shortened product lifecycles, synchronized supply chains, when coupled with advances in information system, is driving most firms towards make-to-order (MTO) operations. Increasing global competition, lower profit margins, and higher customer expectations force the MTO firms to plan its capacity by managing the effective demand. The goal of this research was to maximize the operational profits of a make-to-order operation by selectively accepting incoming customer orders and simultaneously allocating capacity for them at the sales stage. For integrating the two decisions, a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) was formulated which can aid an operations manager in an MTO environment to select a set of potential customer orders such that all the selected orders are fulfilled by their deadline. The proposed model combines order acceptance/rejection decision with detailed scheduling. Experiments with the formulation indicate that for larger problem sizes, the computational time required to determine an optimal solution is prohibitive. This formulation inherits a block diagonal structure, and can be decomposed into one or more sub-problems (i.e. one sub-problem for each customer order) and a master problem by applying Dantzig-Wolfe’s decomposition principles. To efficiently solve the original MILP, an exact Branch-and-Price algorithm was successfully developed. Various approximation algorithms were developed to further improve the runtime. Experiments conducted unequivocally show the efficiency of these algorithms compared to a commercial optimization solver. The existing literature addresses the static order acceptance problem for a single machine environment having regular capacity with an objective to maximize profits and a penalty for tardiness. This dissertation has solved the order acceptance and capacity planning problem for a job shop environment with multiple resources. Both regular and overtime resources is considered. The Branch-and-Price algorithms developed in this dissertation are faster and can be incorporated in a decision support system which can be used on a daily basis to help make intelligent decisions in a MTO operation

Modeling Electricity Markets as Two-Stage Capacity Constrained Price Competition Games under Uncertainty

The last decade has seen an increasing application of game theoretic tools in the analysis of electricity markets and the strategic behavior of market players. This paper focuses on the model examined by Fabra et al. (2008), where the market is described by a two-stage game with the firms choosing their capacity in the first stage and then competing in prices in the second stage. By allowing the firms to endogenously determine their capacity, through the capacity investment stage of the game, they can greatly affect competition in the subsequent pricing stage. Extending this model to the demand uncertainty case gives a very good candidate for modeling the strategic aspect of the investment decisions in an electricity market. After investigating the required assumptions for applying the model in electricity markets, we present some numerical examples of the model on the resulting equilibrium capacities, prices and profits of the firms. We then proceed with two results on the minimum value of price caps and the minimum required revenue from capacity mechanisms in order to induce adequate investments

Investment Incentives and Electricity Spot Market Design

In liberalized electricity markets strategic firms compete in an environment characterized by fluctuating demand and non-storability of electricity. While spot market design under those conditions by now is well understood, a rigorous analysis of investment incentives is still missing. Existing models, as the peak-load-pricing approach, analyze welfare optimal investment and find that optimal investment is higher with more competitive spot markets. In this article we want to extend the analysis to investment decisions of strategic firms that anticipate competition on many consecutive spot markets with fluctuating (and possibly uncertain) demand. We study how the degree of spot market competition affects investment incentives and welfare and provide an application of the model to electricity market data. Our results show that more competitive spot market prices strictly decrease investment incentives of strategic firms. The reduction of investment incentives can be so intense to even offset the beneficial impact of more competitive spot market design. Those results obtain with and without free entry. Our analysis thus demonstrates that investment incentives necessarily have to be taken into account for a meaningful assessment of proper electricity spot market design

Co-operative competition: a Foucauldian perspective

This paper considers the extent to which Michel Foucault's conception of power gives a useful explanation of power relations between firms. It examines the perceived shift in the nature of interfirm relations from the traditional model in which firms operate as autonomous units within a competitive industry, to the co-operative competition model whereby firms engage in co-operation at certain levels of their operations and compete at other levels. It argues that the concepts of power and competition are closely intertwined and that an understanding of how power operates can give a greater understanding of the nature of competition within an industry. However the issue of power relations in the presence of co-operative competition has not been adequately explored by the literature. An analysis of the type of power reflected in interfirm relations is held as being the key to understanding the simultaneous existence of co-operation and competition between firms

The Spanish Electricity Industry: Plus ca Change

Working paper públicado por el Instituto de Economía Industrial. serie nº 317,IDEI Working papersIn this paper we describe the Spanish electricity industry and its current regulatory regime. Special emphasis is given to the description and discussion of market design issues (including stranded cost recovery), the evolution of market structure, investment in generation capacity and network activities. We also provide a critical assessment of the 1997 regulatory reform, which did not succeed in introducing effective competition, but retained an opaque regulation which has been subject to continuous governmental interventionism. Furthermore, the implementation of the Kyoto agreement could show the lack of robustness of the regulatory regime

The timing of capacity expansion investments in oligopoly under demand uncertainty

Since a flexibility value emerges in waiting to expand capacity, the impact of demand uncertainty in an oligopolistic industry leads to capacity expansion timing. The creation of growth opportunities is then the outcome of expanding capacity at optimal times. However, in our model different capacity size competitors interact not affecting each others, because assessing the impact of demand uncertainty on capacity expansion projects takes them to set up independently their optimal capacity expansion timing schedules. In equilibrium no firm expands capacity more often than any other. Under demand uncertainty simultaneity in capacity expansions is the only possible Markov Perfect Equilibrium

Endogenous Timing of Moves in Bertrand-Edgeworth Triopolies

We determine the endogenous order of moves in which the firms set their prices in the framework of a capacity-constrained Bertrand-Edgeworth triopoly. A three-period timing game that determines the period in which the firms announce their prices precedes the price-setting stage. We show for the non-trivial case (in which the Bertrand-Edgeworth triopoly has only an equilibrium in non-degenerated mixed-strategies) that the firm with the largest capacity sets its price first, while the two other firms set their prices later. Our result extends a finding by Deneckere and Kovenock (1992) from duopolies to triopolies. This extension was made possible by Hirata's (2009) recent advancements on the mixed-strategy equilibria of Bertrand-Edgeworth games

Investment incentives and auction design in electricity markets

Motivated by the regulatory debate in electricity markets, we seek to understand how market design affects market performance through its impact on investment incentives. For this purpose, we study a two-stage game in which firms choose their capacities under demand uncertainty prior to bidding into the spot market. We analyse a number of different market design elements, including (i) two commonly used auction formats, the uniform-price and discriminatory auctions, (ii) price-caps and (iii) bid duration. We find that, although the discriminatory auction tends to lower prices, this does not imply that investment incentives at the margin are poorer; indeed, under reasonable assumptions on the shape of the demand distribution, the discriminatory auction induces (weakly) stronger investment incentives than the uniform-price format