Reference quality, as a benchmark against which the purchase quality of a product is judged, has an important impact on consumers’ purchase decision, especially perishable items. Thus, how to determine an appropriate quality investment and ordering strategies for perishable items to maximize retailers’ profit is an essential task. A joint dynamic quality investment and inventory replenishment problem for perishable items with consideration of reference quality effect is investigated, where the retailer sells its products using a combination of the offline and online stores, and the sales function is sensitive to products’ quality and consumers’ reference quality. The optimal control model is established to maximize the retailer’s total profit by making a joint quality and inventory strategy. The continuous time dynamic optimal quality investment and inventory replenishment strategies with reference quality effect are obtained by Pontryagin’s maximum principle. Numerical experiments are accounted for the key system parameters on the optimal strategies.
This paper utilizes the consumers’ reference price in prospect theory to analyze an omnichannel retailer’s multiperiod pricing and inventory management problem in which consumers can cancel their orders before payment and return the products after payment if the products do not meet their expectation. The omnichannel retailer’s optimal equilibrium pricing and ending inventory level are derived under reference price effects by maximizing the discounted total profit over the infinite planning horizon, where the optimal decisions we discussed under two scenarios: loss neutrality and loss aversion. The analysis shows that the convergence of the pricing and ending inventory level toward their equilibrium is from above or below, depending on the relative location of the initial reference price with respect to the unique equilibrium price. Moreover, a set of sensitivity analyses is discussed to characterize the impacts of system parameters on the optimal decisions. This research fills the gap of behavioral operation in the field of omnichannel joint pricing and inventory management.
This paper considers a single-item joint pricing and inventory replenishment problem under reference price effects in consecutive T periods. Demands in consecutive periods are sensitive to price and reference price with general demand distribution. At the end of each period, after the demand realization, a firm can return excess stocks to a supplier or place an expediting order to reduce the loss by shortage. Unfilled demands are fully backlogged. In order to maximize the total expected discounted profit with reference price effects the optimal pricing and inventory replenishment policies for regular order and the inventory adjustment decisions for returning/expediting are derived. The optimal replenishment policy for regular order is a base-stock policy, the optimal pricing policy is a base-stock-list-price policy, and the optimal policy for returning/expediting inventory adjustment follows a dual-threshold policy. Furthermore, the analysis of the operational impacts (from the perspective of adding returning/expediting and reference price effects, respectively) is researched. Numerical results also show that considering both returning/expediting and reference price effects is more profitable than considering only one of them.
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