مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله امگا – Omega

A fundamental building block in the operations management literature is the classical newsvendor setting wherein a newsvendor orders a quantity of a perishable or seasonal product from an outside supplier with ample capacity to meet a random demand with certain distributions in a single period; any lost sales would incur the corresponding penalty costs, and any excess inventories can be salvaged at a given per-unit salvage value at the end of the period. The newsvendor’s objective is to determine his stock quantity before the demand is realized to maximize his own expected profit.

As it is convenient to analyze, many studies use the classical newsvendor model and its extensions. We refer to [14,20], and [5] for extensive reviews on this topic. In this study, we extend the classical newsvendor model to a case where a newsvendor sells a single product over a single selling season in order to determine both the selling price and stock quantity to maximize expected profit. We assume strategic, forward-looking customers who recognize that the product may become available on the salvage market and consider delaying their purchase until the end of the selling season to maximize their expected surplus by purchasing the product at the salvage value. Note that strategic consumer behavior is widely observed in many industries, e.g., fashion apparel and consumer electronics. A typical clothing retailer must always determine an initial selling price before bringing a certain type of clothing to market. If the clothing is very popular, the price remains the same until the items are sold out. However, if the demand is less than the corresponding stock quantity, the retailer has to offer markdowns close to the end of the selling season. Some customers may delay their purchase when they can anticipate that the item will be available in the future at a lower price to obtain a relatively greater surplus. Accordingly, the retailer must consider potential strategic consumer behavior when making the pricing and stock decisions. The model and the corresponding results in this study aim to provide insights into this decisionmaking situation.

We consider two demand cases: additive and multiplicative. In the former, demand is defined as the sum of a deterministic demand function, d(p) that is dependent on the selling price p and a random variable ϵ that is independent of the price. In the multiplicative case, demand is defined as the product of d(p) and ϵ. For both demand cases, we develop the newsvendor’s decisions in the context of strategic consumer behavior. Moreover, we compare the decisions in our setting with those in two special cases. Case M (in which customers are myopic) and Case I (in which demand is independent of the selling price). The results show that neglecting price-sensitivity as a factor of demand leads to sub-optimal decisions. Additionally, we demonstrate that under certain conditions, strategic consumer behavior may positively affect the newsvendor’s optimal expected profit in the additive demand case.