We study a two-stage purchase contract with a demand forecast update. The purchase contract provides the buyer an opportunity to adjust an initial commitment based on an updated demand forecast obtained at a later stage. An adjustment, if any, incurs a fixed as well as a variable cost. Using a...

Inventory inaccuracy is common at retailers. At many retailers, a cash register records incoming orders and outgoing sales, but not the demand or the shrinkage. The shrinkage refers to spoilage or pilferage of inventory. The demand differs from the sales in the periodic-review lost-sales...

Optimal control theory is employed to derive explicitly the optimal (profit maximizing) price of a durable new product over time. The sales rate dynamics depends on the product price and on the unsold portion of the market. Specifically, the hazard rate (i.e. the probability of a purchase by a...

This paper considers the case of partially observed demand in the context of a multi-period inventory problem with lost sales. Demand in a period is observed if it is less than the inventory level in that period and the leftover inventory is carried over to the next period. Otherwise, only the...

Markov-modulated processes have been used in stochastic inventory models with setup costs for modeling demand under the influence of uncertain environmental factors, such as fluctuating economic and market conditions. The analyses of these models have been carried out in the literature only...

The models we present in this chapter are related to two classical inventory models: The EOQ model of Harris (1913) and the dynamic lot size model of Wagner and Whitin (1958). In relation to the EOQ model, our models depart in three different ways: (1) the EOQ model assumes that the problem...