Joint Inventory and Pricing for a One-Warehouse Multistore Problem: Spiraling Phenomena, Near Optimal Policies, and the Value of Dynamic Pricing
研究单仓库多门店在缺货情况下的联合库存与定价问题，分析简单启发式策略的螺旋恶化现象，提出两种近优策略，并证明动态定价能显著提升绩效。
In “Joint Inventory and Pricing for a One-Warehouse Multistore Problem: Spiraling Phenomena, Near Optimal Policies, and the Value of Dynamic Pricing,” Lei, Liu, Jasin, and Vakhutinsky consider a joint inventory and pricing problem with one warehouse and multiple stores with lost sales. The retailer makes a one-time decision on the amount of inventory to be placed at the warehouse at the beginning of the selling season, followed by periodic joint replenishment and pricing decisions for each store throughout the season. The authors first analyze the performance of two popular and simple heuristic policies that directly implement the solution of a deterministic approximation of the original stochastic problem. They show that simple reoptimization of the deterministic approximation may worsen the performance by causing a “spiraling up” movement in expected lost sales quantity. The authors further propose two improved heuristic policies with provably near-optimal performance. In particular, the first policy achieves the best possible performance among all policies that rely on static pricing, and the second policy outperforms the first one because of its use of carefully designed dynamic pricing scheme.