Optimal Ordering and Pricing Policies for Seasonal Products: Impacts of Demand Uncertainty and Capital Constraint

With a stochastic price-dependent market demand, this paper investigates how demand uncertainty and capital constraint affect retailer’s integrated ordering and pricing policies towards seasonal products. The retailer with capital constraint is normalized to be with zero capital endowment while it can be financed by an external bank. The problems are studied under a low and high demand uncertainty scenario, respectively. Results show that when demand uncertainty level is relatively low, the retailer faced with demand uncertainty always sets a lower price than the riskless one, while its order quantity may be smaller or larger than the riskless retailer’s which depends on the level of market size. When adding a capital constraint, the retailer will strictly prefer a higher price but smaller quantity policy. However, in a high demand uncertainty scenario, the impacts are more intricate. The retailer faced with demand uncertainty will always order a larger quantity than the riskless one if demand uncertainty level is high enough (above a critical value), while the capital-constrained retailer is likely to set a lower price than the well-funded one when demand uncertainty level falls within a specific interval. Therefore, it can be further concluded that the impact of capital constraint on the retailer’s pricing decision can be influenced by different demand uncertainty levels

Optimal Switching Strategy between Admission Control and Pricing Control Policies with Two Types of Customers and Search Costs

This paper presents a switching strategy between the admission control and the pricing control policies in a queueing system with two types of customers. For an arriving first-type customer, the decision maker has an option on which policy to choose between the two control policies; that is, one determines whether or not to admit the customer’s request for the service (admission control) or decides a price of the customer’s request and offers it to the customer (pricing control). The second-type customers are only served when no first-type customers are present in the system in order to prevent the system from being idle. This would yield an extra income, which we refer to as the sideline profit. The so-called search cost, which is a cost paid to search for customers, creates the search option on whether to continue the search or not. We clarify the properties of the optimal switching strategy as well as the optimal search policy in relation to the sideline profit in order to maximize the total expected net profit. In particular, we show that when the sideline profit is sufficiently large, the two optimal switching thresholds exist with respect to the number of first-type customers in the system