The benefit of horizontal decentralization in durable good procurement

A conventional wisdom in industry and academia is that firms suffer from decentralized procurement. In this paper, we demonstrate an important and counter-intuitive benefit of procurement decentralization in a common setting where a firm with multiple divisions procures a durable good from a supplier. We start with a two-period model and obtain analytic equilibrium results on the supplier's wholesale prices, and the firm's procurement quantities and profits under procurement centralization and decentralization. These results show that the firm's profit will benefit from decentralization if and only if the product is durable. We further show that the profit improvement always increases in durability and the number of divisions. To generalize the basic model with two periods, we design an iterative algorithm to compute the equilibrium results for any number of periods. Our extensive numerical simulations show the robustness of our analytic results and managerial insights.