Dynamic Risk Management of Commodity Operations: Model and Analysis

Abstract

We consider the dynamic risk management problem for a commodity processor operating in a partially complete market and facing both price uncertainty and significant financial distress costs. The firm procures an input commodity and processes it to produce an output commodity over a multi-period horizon. We use a time-consistent risk measure to approximate the firm's financial distress costs in a tractable manner and use financial trading to assign a market-based value to the firm's operational cash flows. We show that the resulting optimal operational policy has the same price and horizon dependent threshold structure that characterizes the known optimal policy when markets are complete or financial distress costs are small. We also show that a myopic policy is optimal when the procurement and processing capacities are equal. Through numerical studies, we (i) quantify the value of using the optimal operational policy rather than a myopic policy and a policy that neglects to model, even approximately, financial distress costs, finding that this value is significant for firms that face moderate financial distress costs and have excess procurement capacity; (ii) establish that more acute financial distress costs reduce the firm's market-based value and throughput; and (iii) show that the benefit of financial hedging is considerable.