Coordinating operational policy with financial hedging for risk-averse firms

• A new approach to quantify the effects of financial hedging on operational policies.
• The approach alleviates some of the difficulties arising from market incompleteness.
• A certainty equivalent operator is employed to formulate the Bellman equation.
• The base-stock policy can remain optimal under specific conditions.

A risk-averse firm׳s financial hedging activity can impact the decision making in its daily operations. We introduce a CE-based approach that can help the firm to simplify the procedure in making hedging-consistent decisions. A key feature of this new approach is that it allows for the existence of nonfinancial random factors, which give rise to the risk exposure that cannot be hedged in the financial market. By using a CE operator, we show that the optimal operational policy can be obtained by maximizing the CE-based value function. Although the CE operator may bring additional nonlinearity to the value function, we find that the commonly desired base-stock policy can remain optimal under specific conditions. We hope that this new approach can help pave the way for future investigation on joint operations management and financial hedging problems in dynamic settings.