Specific investment and supplier vulnerability

摘要

Apart from the familiar holdup problem, we investigate another implication of specific investment that has not been examined systematically in the literature. That is, the presence of specific investment can make a supplier vulnerable to large negative shocks to its customer's business. We demonstrate that this vulnerability causes the supplier to under-invest and a larger volatility in the customer's business exacerbates the supplier's under-investment. More surprisingly, a higher degree of specificity may induce the supplier to invest more, rather than less, in the specific asset. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.