continuously increasing price in an inventory cycle an optimal strategy for e-tailers不断提高价格的库存周期的零售商的最优策略.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences Volume 2008, Article ID 483267, 14 pages doi:10.1155/2008/483267 Research Article Continuously Increasing Price in an Inventory Cycle: An Optimal Strategy for E-Tailers Prafulla Joglekar,1 Patrick Lee,2 and Alireza M. Farahani3 1 Management Department, La Salle University, 1900 W. Olney Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19141-1199, USA 2 IS/OM Department, Fairfield University, 1073 North Benson Road, Fairfield, CT 06824-5154, USA 3 Computer Science and Information Systems Department, School of Engineering and Technology, National University, 11255 North Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037-0515, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Prafulla Joglekar, joglekar@ Received 31 May 2007; Accepted 21 April 2008 Recommended by Andreas Soteriou Operations researchers have always assumed that when a product’s unit cost is constant and its demand curve is known and stationary, a retailer of the product would find it optimal to replenish the inventory with a fixed quantity and to sell the product always at a fixed price. We present, with proof, a model that shows that, in such a case, an e-tailer is better off using a continuously increasing price strategy than using a fixed price strategy within each inventory cycle. Sensitivity analysis shows that this strategy is particularly profitable when demand is highly price sensitive and the inventory ordering and carrying costs are high. Copyright q 2008 Prafulla Joglekar et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. Introduction When a retailer of a p