On the Exchange of Information in Collaborative Product Development

We develop a dynamic programming (DP) model of the product development (PD) process. We conceptualize PD as a sequence of decisions: whether to incorporate a piece of information that just arrived (i.e. became available) or wait longer. We utilize this formulation to derive optimal decision rules to determine whether (and when) to incorporate newly available information in an archetypal situation in PD. The managerial implications are discussed with several numerical examples.