Local manufacturing and structural shifts in competition: Market dynamics of additive manufacturing

Additive manufacturing (AM) allows to build components and finished series products directly from 3D data, without the need for tooling or other setup cost. An often discussed, but hardly investigated opportunity of AM is to establish economical and scalable local production facilities for innovating consumers (who turn into “prosumers”). In this paper, we investigate the effect of such a local production (enabled by AM) on consumer welfare,...