Learning to time capacity expansions: an empirical analysis of the worldwide petrochemical industry, 1975–95

This paper examines how firms may learn to better time their capacity expansion decisions through their own and their rivals' past experiences. A review of the literature shows that there may be several reasons for firms to bunch their capacity additions or ‘hop on an investment bandwagon.’ These reasons include coordinating through maintaining market shares, information effects, and decision‐making biases. Given the substantial evidence of organizational learning, firms may be expected to improve their timing skills of capacity additions through their previous capacity expansion experience. Hypotheses are developed both for proprietary learning and learning at the industry level, and for forgetting. These hypotheses are tested on a database consisting of 72 companies operating in the petrochemicals industry in the United States, Europe, and Japan from 1975 to 1995. The results indicate that learning in timing capacity expansion decisions comes primarily from within firms through an accumulation of their poor outcomes. However, this timing skill is far more apparent in greenfield than incremental expansion decisions. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.