Inventory control under corporate income tax and accrual accounting
研究了在比例税制和亏损结转下，企业如何制定最优库存策略，发现税收凸性导致风险规避、亏损结转引发风险寻求，忽略税收会带来显著损失。
Corporate income tax constitutes a significant portion of financial costs in business operations. A typical tax system is characterized by the tax structure, accounting method, and loss carryover rule. In this article, we study the optimal inventory policies under taxation and accrual accounting. We consider a lost-sales periodic-review inventory system under a proportional tax with loss carryforward. We formulate the problem as a cyclic stochastic dynamic program with multiple accounting periods, each of which consists of multiple review periods. We show that an income-dependent basestock policy is optimal. We find that tax function convexity and loss carryforward may introduce conflicting incentives into inventory decisions: the former drives risk-averse decisions whereas the latter induces risk-seeking behavior. We identify two intertemporal effects of taxation, the intra-accounting-period effect and the inter-accounting-period effect, both inducing smaller basestock levels. We further extend the analysis to the progressive tax, backordering system, and cash accounting method. Our numerical study examines the effects of various characteristics of taxation on the optimal policies. Our results demonstrate that ignoring taxation in inventory decisions may lead to significant losses especially when the tax rate and demand uncertainty are sufficiently high, which reveals the value of tax considerations in inventory management.