the effect of supply uncertainty in price setting newsvendor models abstract we consider a price setting newsvendor model in which a firm needs to make joint inventory and pricing decisions before the selling season the supply process is uncertain such that the received quantity is the product of the order quantity and a random yield rate two cost structures are investigated the in house production case in which the firm pays for the input quantity and the procurement case in which the firm pays for the quantity received only our objective is to investigate the effect of yield randomness on optimal decisions and expected profit by using the theory of stochastic comparisons we find that under both cost structures a less variable yield rate leads to a lower optimal price and a higher expected profit moreover we show that in the in house production case a stochastically larger yield rate also results in a lower optimal price and a higher profit but this is not true in the procurement case examples show that the effect of supply uncertainty on optimal order quantity is not universal

optimal ordering and pricing policies in a single period environment with multivariate demand and markdowns this paper investigates a single period inventory model in which the demand of the product is a deterministic multivariate function of price time and level of inventory models are formulated for the basic pricing case and the case with a price markdown during the season solution methodologies are presented for each case when the pricing decisions are predetermined and when they are decision variables comments on the practical use of this model are presented and sensitivity analysis is conducted on the decision variables and demand parameters

modeling a multi attribute utility newsvendor with partial backlogging abstract traditional newsvendor models usually focus on single profit maximization or cost minimization approaches however making a monetary estimate of the consequences of lost sales as a result of shortages is often a difficult task for many practitioners besides there is still a lack of an explicit account of decision making judgments on the multiple consequences of making decisions with regard to order quantities in order to deal with this problem this paper presents a multi attribute utility model for the newsvendor problem with regard to profit the impacts of service level on corporate image and on customers goodwill and the impact on the environment arising from the disposal of unsold products demand is partially backlogged according to a decreasing exponential function of the waiting time the fundamental principles and limitations related to the application of the model built are also discussed

production capacity planning for multiple products under uncertain demand conditions abstract this study chiefly deliberates issues regarding capacity allocation for multiple products when producing multiple products a manufacturer needs to allocate a favorable production quantity to each product under conditions of uncertain demand since the excess or shortage of a product will in turn cause the loss of profit the proposed model and the corresponding algorithm in this study are used to find out the optimal capacity allocation under the given probability density function of specific demands and to effectively allocate limited capacity to multiple products with an aim to maximize profit finally the numerical example suggests that the marginal profit the inventory holding cost the shortage cost the loss of excess production and market demands should be considered in an effort to discover an optimal capacity allocation with regard to multiple products

pricing and the news vendor problem a review with extensions in the newsvendor problem a decision maker facing random demand for a perishable product decides how much of it to stock for a single selling period this simple problem with its intuitively appealing solution is a crucial building block of stochastic inventory theory which comprises a vast literature focusing on operational efficiency typically in this literature market parameters such as demand and selling price are exogenous however incorporating these factors into the mode l can provide an excellent vehicle for examining how operational problems interact with marketing issues to influence decision making at the firm level in this paper we examine an extension of the newsvendor problem in which stocking quantity and selling price are set simultaneously we provide a comprehensive review that synthesizes existing results for the single period problem and develop additional results to enrich the existing knowledge base we also review and develop insight into a dynamic inventory extension of this problem and motivate the applicability of such models

on the effect of demand randomness on inventories and costs we explore analytically cardinal effects of the extent of demand randomness on optimal inventory levels and the associated expected costs to model changes in demand randomness we make extensive use of a mean preserving transformation commonly used in probabilistic microeconomics as well as the notion of risk pooling aggregating independent demands for the single period news vendor model the order quantity and associated costs are shown to depend on the randomness parameter in a simple and highly interpretable manner we show by a simple example that in some situations risk pooling might neither reduce inventories nor move them closer to the mean or median demand the managerial relevance of such analyses is discussed

dispatch planning using newsvendor dual problems and occupation times application to hydropower abstract we consider price driven dispatch planning under price uncertainty a storable commodity is optimally sold and purchased over time first we consider models where the storage level is constrained in expectation the dual of the corresponding optimization problem is related to the newsvendor problem exact solutions of bang bang type are given the second methodology is for high frequency dispatch decisions in multistage stochastic programming models to overcome the curse of dimensionality prices are modeled by occupation times at price levels in a case study we consider a pumped storage hydropower plant numerical solutions are given which have similar patterns as for the first exactly solvable problems

a utility adjusted newsvendor model with stochastic demand abstract we develop a continuous time newsvendor model to determine the optimal inventory level for commodities in an established financial market unlike most models in literature the newsvendor is not necessarily risk neutral and chooses the order quantity that maximises the expected utility of the cash flow at the end of the period the newsvendor exploits the correlation between stochastic demand and the price of the commodities in order to manage risks by investing in a portfolio of financial instruments the decision problem therefore includes not only the determination of the optimal ordering policy but also at the same time the selection of a portfolio that maximises her utility further we demonstrate that our model compared to a myopic approach i e no hedging requires significantly lower levels of inventory buffer to mitigate demand uncertainty thus better utilising capital

mean variance analysis of sourcing decision under disruption risk this study considers a mean variance mv framework for managing disruption risk in a two echelon supply chain with a risk averse buyer and multiple unreliable suppliers under newsvendor nv setting an mv objective function is designed to maximize the buyer s expected profit while minimizing its variance study of the structural property of the problem proves the existence of a global maxima and a set of efficient portfolios consisting of dominating mean variance pairs we demonstrate the effect of model parameters through comparative statics analysis an algorithm is developed to overcome the computational complexity of the higher dimensional problem numerical studies on model behavior show that the proposed algorithm gives the exact optimal solution while being tractable

managing channel profits a channel of distribution consists of different channel members each having his own decision variables however each channel member s decisions do affect the other channel members profits and as a consequence actions a lack of coordination of these decisions can lead to undesirable consequences for example in the simple manufacturer retailer consumer channel uncoordinated and independent channel members decisions over margins result in a higher price paid by the consumer than if those decisions were coordinated in addition the ensuing suboptimal volume leads to lower profits for both the manufacturer and the retailer this paper explores the problems inherent in channel coordination we address the following questions what is the effect of channel coordination what causes a lack of coordination in the channel how difficult is it to achieve channel coordination what mechanisms exist which can achieve channel coordination what are the strengths and weaknesses of these mechanism what is the role of nonprice variables e g manufacturer advertising retailer shelf space in coordination does the lack of coordination affect normative implications from in store experimentation can quantity discounts be a coordination mechanism are some marketing practices actually disguised quantity discounts we review the literature and present a simple formulation illustrating the roots of the coordination problem we then derive the form of the quantity discount schedule that results in optimum channel profits this article was originally published in marketing science volume 2 issue 3 pages 239 272 in 1983

health insurance and self employment evidence from massachusetts previous studies have found that health insurance is an important component of workers labor market decisions in this article the author studies the effect of health insurance availability and p

inventory models with inventory level dependent demand a comprehensive review and unifying theory marketing researchers and practitioners have long recognized the demand of many retail items is proportional to the amount of inventory displayed recently two distinct types of inventory control models reflecting this relationship have appeared in the literature models in which the demand rate of an item is a function of the initial inventory level and those in which it is dependent on the instantaneous inventory level we present a comprehensive overview of this literature and demonstrate the equivalence of the two types of models through the use of a simple periodic review model an alternative approach to sensitivity analysis for inventory models with inventory level dependent demand is also presented

a price setting newsvendor problem under mean variance criteria the single product single period newsvendor problem with two decision variables namely price and stock quantity is considered the performance measure in addition to the expected revenue includes the variance of the income scaled with a risk parameter we present conditions for the concavity of this risk sensitive performance measure and the uniqueness of the optimal solution for both risk averse and risk seeking cases under the additive demand model and compare the results to others previously published these conditions are introduced in terms of the lost sales rate elasticity furthermore we provide numerical examples that aim to endorse the theoretical results herein explained

corporate social responsibility theories mapping the territory the corporate social responsibility csr field presents not only a landscape of theories but also a proliferation of approaches which are controversial complex and unclear this article tries to clarify the sit uation mapping the territory by classifying the main csr theories and related approaches in four groups 1 instrumental theories in which the corporation is seen as only an instrument for wealth creation and its social activities are only a means to achieve economic results 2 political theories which concern themselves with the power of corporations in society and a responsible use of this power in the political arena 3 integrative theories in which the corporation is focused on the satisfaction of social demands and 4 ethical theories based on ethical responsibilities of corporations to society in practice each csr theory presents four dimensions related to profits political performance social demands and ethical values the findings suggest the necessity to develop a new theory on the business and society relationship which should integrate these four dimensions

public health insurance individual health and entry into self employment we investigate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into self employment health insurance systems that distinguish between the two sectors of employment create incentives or disincentives to start a business for different individuals we estimate a discrete time hazard rate model of entry into self employment based on representative household panel data for germany which include individual health information the results indicate that an increase in the health insurance cost differential between self employed workers and paid employees by 10 per month decreases the probability of entry into self employment by 1 7 of the annual entry rate this shows that entrepreneurship lock which an emerging literature describes for the system of employer provided health insurance in the usa can also occur in a public health insurance system therefore entrepreneurial activity should be taken into account when discussing potential health care reforms

quantity discounts under demand uncertainty to motivate buyers to increase their order quantity suppliers often rely on a well established and widely used approach they offer quantity discounts this practice is in large part driven to obtain improved economies in transportation through higher truckload utilization recently transportation rates which are increasing faster than other costs have become a larger portion of total net landed cost placing the traditional quantity discount practices under scrutiny many suppliers are left perplexed as to why their approach is not effective anymore and some are even concerned that their overall profits may have actually decreased due to their discount parameters in this paper we study a multiperiod model with a buyer facing stochastic end item demand and a supplier offering an all units quantity discount to him to understand better the dynamics of such systems we provide guidelines and insights on how to set effective discount parameters and when not to expect much from them we derive the opt

note the newsvendor model with endogenous demand this paper considers a firm s price and inventory policy when it faces uncertain demand that depends on both price and inventory level the authors extend the classic newsvendor model by assuming that expected utility maximizing consumers choose between visiting the firm and consuming an exogenous outside option the outside option represents the utility the consumer forgoes when she chooses to visit the firm before knowing whether or not the product will be available the authors investigate both the case in which the firm s price is exogenous and the case in which price is chosen optimally the paper makes two contributions first the authors show that the firm holds more inventories provides a higher fill rate attracts more customers and earns higher profits when it internalizes the effect of its inventory on demand second the authors show that in the endogenous price case the firm s two dimensional decision problem can be reduced to two sequential single variable optimizations as a result the endogenous price case is as easy to solve as the exogenous price case

newsvendor solutions via conditional value at risk minimization abstract in this paper we consider the minimization of the conditional value at risk cvar a most preferable risk measure in financial risk management in the context of the well known single period newsvendor problem which is originally formulated as the maximization of the expected profit or the minimization of the expected cost we show that downside risk measures including the cvar are tractable in the problem due to their convexity and consequently under mild assumptions on the probability distribution of products demand we provide analytical solutions or linear programming lp formulation of the minimization of the cvar measures defined with two different loss functions numerical examples are also exhibited clarifying the difference among the models analyzed in this paper and demonstrating the efficiency of the lp solutions

media legitimation effects in the market for initial public offerings in this study we argue that media provided information affects investors impressions of newly public firms in 225 initial public offerings ipos the volume of mediaprovided information had a negative diminishing relationship with underpricing and a positive diminishing relationship with stock turnover on the first day of trading the relationship between the tenor of media provided information and underpricing increases at a nonlinear rate and decreases similarly for turnover findings provide important evidence that publicly available information not only reflects ipos legitimacy but also adds to their legitimacy and influences investor behavior in the last 20 years an increasing amount of research on markets has been conducted from a social constructionist perspective emphasizing how social structures enhance the flow of useful and credible information that market participants use to reduce the uncertainty of market exchanges e g aldrich fiol 1994 zuckerman 1999 further recent organizational research has begun to stress the influence of information intermediaries such as financial analysts and the media on mar

taxation and entrepreneurship in a welfare state does tax policy affect the rate of self employment in a modern welfare state this question is analyzed empirically based on swedish data for the entire postwar period available tax data indicate that payroll taxes have had a negative influence on the unincorporated rate of self employment though the effect is modest no effects from regular labor income taxation or capital gains taxation are found the paper improves upon earlier studies in that it tries to separate the effects of different taxes and uses cointegration techniques a further extension is that it studies a scandinavian high tax welfare state earlier time series studies analyzing self employment and taxation have with few exceptions been based on data from countries with relatively low tax levels and less comprehensive welfare systems notably the usa and the uk

the risk averse and prudent newsboy the effects of risk and risk aversion in the single period inventory newsboy problem are examined comparative static effects of changes in the various price and cost parameters are determined and related to the newsboy s risk aversion the addition of a random background wealth and of an increase in the riskiness of newspaper demand are also examined although many of the comparative effects generally are ambiguous some fairly simple restrictions on preferences and or risk increases are shown to lead to qualitatively deterministic results

multiple dimensions of private information evidence from the long term care insurance market we demonstrate the existence of multiple dimensions of private information in the long term care insurance market two types of people purchase insurance individuals with private information that they are high risk and individuals with private information that they have strong taste for insurance ex post the former are higher risk than insurance companies expect while the latter are lower risk in aggregate those with more insurance are not higher risk our results demonstrate that insurance markets may suffer from asymmetric information even absent a positive correlation between insurance coverage and risk occurrence the results also suggest a general test for asymmetric information

the risk averse newsvendor problem with random capacity abstract we study the effect of capacity uncertainty on the inventory decisions of a risk averse newsvendor we consider two well known risk criteria namely value at risk var included as a constraint and conditional value at risk cvar for the risk neutral newsvendor we find that the optimal order quantity is not affected by the capacity uncertainty however this result does not hold for the risk averse newsvendor problem specifically we find that capacity uncertainty decreases the order quantity under the cvar criterion under the var constraint capacity uncertainty leads to an order decrease for low confidence levels but to an order increase for high confidence levels this implies that the risk criterion should be carefully selected as it has an important effect on inventory decisions this is shown for the newsvendor problem but is also likely to hold for other inventory control problems that future research can address

the newsvendor problem in a global market optimal centralized and decentralized control policies for a two market stochastic inventory system the global markets of today offer to the style goods producer more selling opportunities and pose new challenges in production planning and coordination from a production management standpoint the opportunity to exploit the difference in timing of the selling season of geographically dispersed markets for style goods is important for improving the firm s profitability in this paper we examine the above issue with an insightful model of a producer of style goods selling the goods to two markets a primary and a secondary market with nonoverlapping selling seasons we refer to this problem as the global newsvendor problem for the above two market stochastic inventory systems we first develop optimal centralized control policies then we demonstrate the suboptimality of decentralized production control policies with the production centers at each market treated as independent profit centers and a constant transfer price being used to coordinate their production we propose as an effective alternative a decentralized production control structure with a nonlinear pricing scheme for production coordination among centers administered through an intermediate organizational unit in our modeling we explicitly consider the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the production planning decisions

the loss averse newsvendor model with backordering abstract in this paper we study the optimal order quantity in the loss averse newsvendor model with backordering we first obtain the optimal order quantity to maximize the expected utility to hedge against the risk arising from the uncertainty of market demand we introduce the conditional value at risk cvar measure and derive the optimal order quantity to maximize the cvar objective about utility it is found that the optimal order quantity with the cvar objective is decreasing in the confidence level and thus is smaller than the optimal order quantity to maximize the expected utility it is proved that under the optimal order quantity with the cvar objective the loss averse newsvendor s expected utility is decreasing in the confidence level it further confirms that high risk implies high return and low risk comes with low return

newsvendor problem with random shortage cost under a risk criterion abstract we study profit maximization vs risk approaches for the standard newsvendor problem with uncertainty in demand as well as a generalized version with uncertainty in the shortage cost as often applies in practice we consider two well known risk approaches value at risk var included as a constraint and conditional value at risk cvar we first derive the explicit expressions of the optimal solution with uncertainty of shortage cost under different risk measures and then perform a numerical analysis to quantify the effect of uncertainty in shortage cost and risk measures for the standard newsvendor problem we find that the optimal quantity under cvar is always lower than that under the var constraint which in turn is lower than the order quantity that maximizes the expected profit insightful explanations for this result are that a a higher degree of risk aversion drives the newsvendor to order fewer products increasing the likelihood that all will be sold b this effect is stronger for the cvar approach as this does not consider the expected profit at all another interesting and counter intuitive observation for the cvar approach is that a higher retail price may lead to a smaller order quantity as fewer items need to be sold in order to attain a sufficient profit these results show that one should be careful in employing the cvar risk measure for newsvendor type problems the results remain valid if the shortage cost becomes uncertain however increased uncertainty of this type does improve the relative profitability under the cvar approach by increasing the order quantity under that criterion whilst there is no effect under the other criteria

robust inventory decision under distribution uncertainty a cvar based optimization approach abstract we study the robust inventory decision making problem faced by risk averse managers with incomplete demand information in a newsvendor setting three basic models are developed expected profit maximization cvar based profit maximization and a combination of the two each model is robustly formulated under the assumption of ellipsoid discrete distribution and again under the box discrete distribution each robust model can be mathematically transformed into a second order cone program for ellipsoid uncertainty or into a general convex optimization problem for box uncertainty both transformed problems can be optimally solved directly we offer propositions with proof to show the equivalence of the transformed problems with the original ones numerical examples are given to validate the proposed approach we find that the performances under both ellipsoid and box uncertain distributions are robust finally sensitivity analysis with respect to risk averse levels and trade off coefficients is conducted to validate the proposed models and solution approaches

patterns of attention to renewable energy in the british farming press from 1980 to 2013 abstract the farming sector is a major actor in developing renewable energy providing sites feedstock and investment media coverage can both drive and reflect levels of interest in renewable energy and affect policy support and farmer decision making about deployment this paper presents a content analysis of attention to renewable energy in the british farming press from 1980 to 2013 identifying the topics which sparked sustained media interest cycles of increased attention to specific types of renewable energy are made evident through quantification of article frequencies and qualitative analysis of content the findings contribute to the explanation of the role of information in the diffusion of renewable energy wind energy and liquid biofuels have received the most attention with multiple attention cycles whereas photovoltaics and anaerobic digestion have received focused attention only in recent years policy changes particularly support measures emerge as the most important driver of media attention although public controversies particularly in relation to wind energy lead to longer periods of attention attention typically increases when opportunities in renewable energy emerge and then quickly shifts to a longer stage of focused attention in which opportunities problems and solutions are explored and advice is offered before attention declines the media thus clearly play a role in informing farmers about opportunities arising in relation to renewable energy technology and policy developments but are less helpful in providing on going and consistent information about recurrent and more complex problems thus the farming press appears likely to have the strongest impact on early adopters of renewable technologies but is unlikely to contribute to diffusion at later stages when potential adopters are less willing to bear uncertainties

risk preferences of a newsvendor with service and loss constraints abstract using the newsvendor framework we present an approach to determine an order quantity which is relevant for the observed ordering behavior of an inventory manager whereas in literature just one constraint has been used we suggest two conflicting constraints the service constraint specified by a target value for the cycle service level is fulfilled by high order quantities the loss constraint is characterized by a target resulting in losses is met by low order quantities choosing as objective function a mean deviation rule where risk attitudes are measured by the conditional value at risk the optimal order quantity is determined depending on the risk parameters if the newsvendor is not able to specify the risk preferences we use the constraints to describe the risk attitudes of the decision maker in dependence of the profitability of the product and its demand distribution including those products where no admissible order quantity exists if there are admissible solutions we identify conditions such that the service constraint is dominating i e the prescribed service level is high and necessarily risk taking behavior is implied contrary if the loss constraint dominates i e the probability of loss is low the decision maker in any case is a risk averter but if both the service target and the loss target are not too challenging then for products with high profitability all risk preferences are possible

optimal electric vehicle production strategy under subsidy and battery recycling abstract government subsidy and battery recycling are two common practical issues in the electric vehicle ev market this study investigates a loss averse ev manufacturer s optimal production strategy under uncertain market demand in the presence of both government subsidy and battery recycling an analytical model is built and related optimal solution and numerical experiments are provided results indicate that increased subsidy promotes the manufacturer s optimal production quantity and expected utility increased battery recycling rate promotes the manufacturer s optimal production quantity however the manufacturer s expected utility decreases with the battery recycling rate if the optimal production quantity is sufficiently small this result implies that the manufacturer may prefer a relatively small battery recycling rate when the market scale is small consequently the government should establish regulations to promote battery recycling for environmental protection we find that either subsidy or battery recycling can offset the negative effects of loss aversion on the optimal production quantity and expected utility the majority of our results still hold if we consider multiple repurposing options for used batteries or an alternative subsidy mechanism in particular the manufacturer s optimal production quantity and expected utility are higher under cost subsidy mechanism than under consumer subsidy mechanism

an efficient algorithm for capacitated assortment planning with stochastic demand and substitution abstract the ever increasing product variety in grocery retailing is in conflict with the limited shelf space managing the assortment and regular order quantity for perishable and non perishable products is therefore a core task for retailers retailers want to maximize profit by considering potential revenues purchase costs diminishing profits for products and opportunity costs for unfulfilled demand when determining assortment sizes and order volume to meet stochastic consumer demand we considered a newsvendor based decision model that jointly optimizes assortment size and the associated order volumes for listed items the model considers out of assortment ooa and out of stock oos substitution effects the model is a structural equivalent to the model described in kok and fisher 2007 and solved there via a heuristic procedure we develop an optimal solution procedure and a time efficient heuristic that solves the model the heuristic suggested is applicable for practically relevant large scale problem instances numerical tests reveal that the heuristic procedure produces close to optimal solutions and outperforms the kok and fisher heuristic with regard to both computational time and solution quality a simulation study with discrete demand justifies our approach with using continuous demand distributions the numerical analyses show that considering substitution effects in a decision based model has a significant impact on the total profit and solution structure further managerial insights are presented with regard to assortment heterogeneity when shelf size substitution and demand variability are varied

the multi item newsvendor model with cross selling and the solution when demand is jointly normally distributed abstract products are often demanded in tandem because of the cross selling effect the demand for an item can increase if sales of its cross selling associated items are achieved or decrease when the associated items are out of stock resulting in lost sales therefore a joint inventory policy should be pursued in a cross selling system this paper introduces customer driven cross selling into centralized and competitive newsvendor nv models by representing an item s effective demand as a function of other items order quantities we derive first order optimality conditions for the centralized model in addition to pure strategy nash equilibrium conditions and uniqueness conditions of the equilibria for the competitive model we further develop gradient based gb and iteration based ib algorithms to solve the centralized and competitive models respectively a computational study verifies the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms the computational results show that a larger cross selling effect leads to a larger order quantity in a centralized nv model but a smaller order quantity in a competitive nv model and a larger positive correlation between items demands leads to higher profits with smaller order quantities in both models moreover nvs will order more items if the demand variance is greater however resulting in lower profits in a competitive situation one will prefer smaller order quantities than in a centralized decision situation

newsvendor models for innovative products with one shot decision theory abstract in this paper newsvendor problems for innovative products are analyzed because the product is new no relevant historical data is available for statistical demand analysis instead of using the probability distribution the possibility distribution is utilized to characterize the uncertainty of the demand we consider products whose life cycles are expected to be smaller than the procurement lead times determining optimal order quantities of such products is a typical one shot decision problem for a retailer therefore newsvendor models for innovative products are proposed based on the one shot decision theory osdt the main contributions of this research are as follows the general solutions of active passive apprehensive and daring focus points and optimal alternatives are proposed and the existence theorem is established in the one shot decision theory a simple and effective approach for identifying the possibility distribution is developed newsvendor models with four types of focus points are built managerial insights into the behaviors of different types of retailers are gained by the theoretical analysis the proposed models are scenario based decision models which provide a fundamental alternative to analyze newsvendor problems for innovative products

the role of infomediaries csr in the business press during 2000 2009 given the important role that business media play in corporate life scarce attention has been paid to the role of media in the construction and popularization of corporate social responsibility c

designing contracts for a reverse supply chain with strategic recycling behavior of consumers abstract in this paper we propose five typical contracts to coordinate decentralized reverse supply chains with strategic recycling behavior of consumers first a reverse supply chain model with strategic recycling behavior of consumers is developed based on the classical newsvendor problem next after analyzing the wholesale price contract we find that the collection quantity of used products increases with the wholesale price then we develop a two stage price contract and find that under this contract the manufacturer could increase the collection quantity by offering a direct incentive to the collector afterwards using the centralized optimal profit as the benchmark we compare the wholesale price contract with the subsidy contract and the cost pooling contract respectively the results show that the subsidy contract is more beneficial to the manufacturer while the cost pooling contract is helpful to the collector yet both lead to lower transfer prices than the wholesale price contract for reverse supply chains finally we design an indemnity contract and conclude that the collector s maximum performance is achieved only when the transfer price equals to the indemnity the total profit of the reverse supply chain under the indemnity contact is not less than that under the wholesale price contract

newsvendor problem with clearance pricing abstract the newsvendor nv problem assumes that the salvage clearance price at which the leftover inventory is disposed of is a given parameter of the problem in this paper we relax this assumption and consider the nv problem with the salvage clearance price as a decision variable we have drawn from the literatures on the nv problem and clearance markdown dynamic pricing to develop three stochastic models in this paper in the first model we assume that while the seasonal demand is exogenous and stochastic the end of season demand is endogenous and deterministic the second model extends the first model by assuming that the end of season demand is endogenous and stochastic finally the third model considers that both the seasonal and end of season demands are endogenous and stochastic we have provided solution procedures for solving the stochastic optimization problems we have also performed sensitivity analyses to assess the sensitivity of the optimal expected profit and order quantity to different problem parameters specifically we have found that the optimal expected profit is most sensitive to the variable cost per unit mean seasonal demand and market potential of end of season demand our models will be useful for retailers of products with a short selling season and a short end of season period for clearance sale of leftover inventory such that there is a single replenishment opportunity at the beginning of the season and a single opportunity for setting the salvage price for clearance sale based on the leftover inventory and end of season demand pattern the paper is concluded with possible directions for future research

tax progressivity and self employment evidence from canadian provinces we examine the effects of personal income tax progressivity in the sense of rising marginal income tax rate on self employment the impacts of income tax progressivity on self employment depend on the relative effects of taxing success and the presence of tax evasion opportunities empirical estimates using canadian provincial data for the period 1979 2006 indicate that there is a negative association between income tax progressivity and self employment this suggests that the adverse impact of income tax on entrepreneurial risk taking outweighs the tax evasion opportunities for the self employed an important implication of our results is that a reduction in income tax progressivity encourages self employment the empirical estimates are robust to the various sensitivity checks

sensitivity analysis of the newsvendor model abstract quality of decisions in inventory management models depends on the accuracy of parameter estimates used for decision making in many situations error in decision making is unavoidable in such cases sensitivity analysis is necessary for better implementation of the model though the newsvendor model is one of the most researched inventory models little is known about its robustness in this paper we perform sensitivity analysis of the classical newsvendor model conditions for symmetry skewness of cost deviation i e deviation of expected demand supply mismatch cost from its minimum have been identified these conditions are closely linked with symmetry skewness of the demand density function a lower bound of cost deviation is established for symmetric unimodal demand distributions based on demonstrations of the lower bound we found the newsvendor model to be sensitive to sub optimal ordering decisions more sensitive than the economic order quantity model order quantity deviation i e deviation of order quantity from its optimum is explored briefly we found the magnitude of order quantity deviation to be comparable with that of parameter estimation error mean demand is identified as the most influential parameter in deciding order quantity deviation

a benchmark solution for the risk averse newsvendor problem in this paper we derive the first order conditions for optimality for the problem of a risk averse expected utility maximizer newsvendor we use these conditions to solve a special case where the utility function is any increasing differentiable function and the random demand is uniformly distributed this special case has a simple closed form solution and therefore it provides an insightful and practical interpretation to the optimal point we show some properties of the solution and also demonstrate how it can be used for assessing the newsvendor utility function parameters

the inverse newsvendor problem choosing an optimal demand portfolio for capacitated resources the classical newsvendor problem is one of optimally choosing a level of capacity to respond to a known demand distribution the inverse newsvendor problem is one of optimally choosing a demand distribution with fixed capacity the applications of the inverse problem include industrial settings where demand management is relatively less costly than capacity adjustments demand distributions are chosen from an opportunity set which reflects the set of market opportunities for the firm we analyze the firm s profit as a function of these demand alternatives provide solution methods and insights and identify inefficient and dominated distributions we provide results when the opportunity set is known or only partially known we extend the results to cases in which there are multiple prioritized customer classes that share the firm s productive capacity this paper was motivated by an industrial application in a firm selling a semicommodity product into three prioritized industrial sectors we review the application of our methods to this setting

combined pricing and inventory control under uncertainty this paper addresses the simultaneous determination of pricing and inventory replenishment strategies in the face of demand uncertainty more specifically we analyze the following single item periodic review model demands in consecutive periods are independent but their distributions depend on the item s price in accordance with general stochastic demand functions the price charged in any given period can be specified dynamically as a function of the state of the system a replenishment order may be placed at the beginning of some or all of the periods stockouts are fully backlogged we address both finite and infinite horizon models with the objective of maximizing total expected discounted profit or its time average value assuming that prices can either be adjusted arbitrarily upward or downward or that they can only be decreased we characterize the structure of an optimal combined pricing and inventory strategy for all of the above types of models we also develop an efficient value iteration method to compute these optimal strategies finally we report on an extensive numerical study that characterizes various qualitative properties of the optimal strategies and corresponding optimal profit values

inventory control with an exponential utility criterion a base stock policy is shown to be optimal when a dynamic version of the news vendor model is optimized with respect to an exponential utility criterion

newsvendor with multiple options of expediting we consider a manufacturer facing single period inventory planning problem with uncertain demand and multiple options of expediting the demand comes at a certain time in the future the manufacturer may order the product in advance with a relatively low cost she can order additional amount by expediting after the demand is realized there are a number of expediting options each of which corresponds to a certain delivery lead time and a unit procurement price the unit procurement price is decreasing over delivery lead time the selling price is also decreasing over time in this paper we assume that the manufacturer must deliver all products to the customer in a single shipment the problem can be formulated as a profit maximization problem we develop structural properties and show how the optimal solution can be identified efficiently in addition we compare our model with the classical newsvendor model and obtain a number of managerial insights

optimal decisions for the loss averse newsvendor problem under cvar abstract most of the existing literature about the newsvendor problem mainly focused on choosing an optimal order quantity to maximize the expected profit of a risk neutral newsvendor however some studies pointed out that in practice managers decisions as to order quantities always deviate from the profit maximization order quantity which is referred to as decision bias in the newsvendor problem then many studies introduced other preferences rather than risk neutrality of the newsvendor to explain such a decision bias this paper thus introduces loss aversion to the research of the newsvendor decision bias we propose a new definition to the loss averse newsvendor problem legacy loss which is defined either as the loss for excess order or the shortage penalty for lost sales when sales time is due the optimal decisions of a loss averse newsvendor are obtained through the following three ways i minimizing the expected legacy loss ii minimizing cvar of legacy loss by combining the cvar measure in risk management iii minimizing the combination of expected legacy loss and cvar of legacy loss and are compared with other existing results besides we present some properties of the optimal decisions as well as relations among them some numerical examples are given to illustrate the obtained results

the inventory billboard effect on the lead time decision abstract this research brings together two important research streams lead time management and the inventory billboard effect while traditional inventory theory which assumes that demand is independent of the average on hand inventory recommends that lead time be reduced to the lowest level possible it is clearly not the case when inventory exhibits the billboard effect which refers to the demand stimulating effect of inventory we use analytical models to examine the firm s optimal lead time decision in the presence of the inventory billboard effect in two scenarios with and without inventory based competition we begin with the single firm scenario where a firm employs the base stock policy for the infinite horizon continuous review inventory problem with a deterministic lead time and inventory dependent demand the firm s decisions are to choose the optimal lead time and the corresponding base stock level to maximize its expected profit rate we find that the inventory billboard effect favors a long lead time because a long lead time results in a higher inventory level which in turn induces more demand we then consider the case where two firms compete on inventory for customer demand we completely characterize the unique nash equilibrium and provide closed form solutions which allow us to conclude that inventory based competition pressures both firms to increase the lead time our numerical studies show that the extent to which demand depends on inventory amplify the impact of competition on the optimal decisions and the associated profit our findings suggest that lead time reduction although widely advocated by popular production philosophies such as just in time has to be carefully evaluated when inventory exhibits billboard effect

a risk averse competitive newsvendor problem under the cvar criterion abstract we study a risk averse newsvendor problem with quantity competition and price competition under the conditional value at risk cvar criterion we characterize the optimal quantity and pricing decisions under both quantity and price competition for quantity competition we consider two demand splitting rules namely proportional demand allocation and demand reallocation although competition always leads to overstocking interestingly it does not necessarily lead to a profit loss in certain competitive environments such as demand reallocation by avoiding reducing overstocking that results from competition under the risk neutral criterion for price competition we consider both additive and multiplicative demand we find that the order quantity sale price and the expected profit decrease in the degree of risk aversion further both high price sensitivity and competition intensity force decision makers to lower their prices however high price sensitivity always reduces the order quantity while competition can have the opposite effect

single versus multiple supplier sourcing strategies successful supply chain management necessitates an effective sourcing strategy to combat uncertainties in both supply and demand in particular supply disruption results in excessive downtime of production resources upstream and downstream supply chain repercussions and eventually a loss in the market value of the firm in this paper we analyze single period single product sourcing decisions under demand uncertainty our approach integrates product prices supplier costs supplier capacities historical supplier reliabilities and firm specific inventory costs a unique feature of our approach is the integration of a firm specific supplier diversification function we also extend our analysis to examine the impact of minimum supplier order quantities our results indicate that single sourcing is a dominant strategy only when supplier capacities are large relative to the product demand and when the firm does not obtain diversification benefits in other cases we find that multiple sourcing is an optimal sourcing strategy we also characterize a non intuitive trade off between supplier minimum order quantities costs and supplier reliabilities finally we examine the robustness of our results through an extensive numerical analysis of the key parameters of our model

the effect of self employed health insurance subsidies on self employment abstract this paper estimates the effect of an increase in the deductibility of health insurance premiums for self employed individuals on the probability of being self employed using a panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2004 we estimate fixed effects instrumental variable regressions for the probability of being self employed entering into self employment and exiting from self employment our results suggest that this policy increased the probability of being self employed by 1 5 percentage points and increased the probability that a taxpayer would be primarily or exclusively self employed by 1 1 and 0 35 percentage points respectively these effects explain about a third to a half of the total increase in self employment by these definitions over the sample period we also find that the probability of entering self employment increased by 0 8 percentage points and find suggestive evidence that the probability of exit decreased by 2 8 percentage points

community rating and the market for private non group health insurance abstract prior research on adverse selection in health insurance markets has found only mixed evidence for adverse selection in group settings we examine the impact of state community rating regulations enacted in the 1990s which greatly limited insurers ability to risk rate premiums to determine if adverse selection is more evident in non group insurance markets using data from large national surveys we find evidence of a shift to a less healthy pool of non group enrollees as a consequence of community rating community rating made healthy people 20 to 60 less likely to be insured by non group health insurance in addition we found evidence that young and healthy people were 20 to 30 more likely to be uninsured as a result of community rating we also find evidence that individuals in poor health were 35 to 50 more likely to be insured in the non group market but only limited evidence suggesting that persons in poor health were less likely to be uninsured our results are further supported by findings suggesting that non group enrollees were sicker as a result of the community rating laws lastly we find evidence suggesting that hmo penetration in the non group market increased disproportionately in states that implemented community rating relative to states that did not

the single item newsboy problem with dual performance measures and quantity discounts abstract this paper considers models for the single item newsboy problem with quantity discount and the following dual performance measure maximize the expected profit subject to a constraint that the probability of achieving a target profit level is no less than a predetermined risk level we also consider two types of quantity discount all unit and incremental for our models with zero shortage cost a closed form solution for determining the optimal order quantity is derived however models with positive shortage cost can only be solved numerically

target market selection and marketing effort under uncertainty the selective newsvendor abstract we consider a firm that markets procures and delivers a good with a single selling season in a number of different markets the price for the good is market dependent and each market has an associated demand distribution with parameters that depend on the amount of marketing effort applied given long procurement lead times the firm must decide which markets it will serve prior to procuring the good we develop a profit maximizing model to address the firm s integrated market selection marketing effort and procurement decisions the model implicitly accounts for inventory pooling across markets which reduces safety stock costs but increases model complexity the resulting model is a nonlinear integer optimization problem for which we develop specialized solution methods for the case in which budget constraints exist we provide a novel solution approach that uses a tailored branch and bound algorithm our approach solves a broad range of 3000 test instances in an average of less than 2 seconds significantly outperforming a leading commercial global optimization solver

statistical testing of bounded rationality with applications to the newsvendor model abstract in this paper we define bounded rationality in terms of probabilistic cost efficiency this establishes a framework where bounded rationality can be examined rigorously by statistical methods we apply this theory to data from laboratory experiments on the newsvendor model we enter into a theoretical discussion of the classical pull to center effect and explain why underorders are typically larger than overorders

reference dependent electric vehicle production strategy considering subsidies and consumer trade offs abstract in this paper we extend previous reference dependence newsvendor research by incorporating both consumer trade offs and government subsidies to evaluate the relevant influences on the optimal electric vehicle ev production decisions we present the properties of the model derive the closed form solutions for the model given the relevant constraints and use numerical experiments to illustrate the results we find that subsidies loss aversion the performance of both evs and internal combustion engine powered vehicles icevs and the coefficient of variation of demand are significant factors influencing the optimal production quantity and the expected utilities of ev production the high selling price and other high costs of icevs help offset the influence of loss aversion whereas the high costs of ev enhance loss aversion our study enriches the literature on subsidies for evs by establishing a behavioral model to incorporate the decision bias in terms of loss aversion at the firm level these findings provide guiding principles for both policymakers and ev managers for making better strategies to promote evs in the early immature market

stochastic stackelberg equilibria with applications to time dependent newsvendor models this is the author s version of the article stochastic stackelberg equilibria with applications to time dependent newsvendor models journal of economic dynamics and control volume 37 issue 7 july 2013 pages 1284 1299

the newsvendor problem review and directions for future research in this paper we review the contributions to date for analyzing the newsvendor problem our focus is on examining the specific extensions for analyzing this problem in the context of modeling customer demand supplier costs and the buyer risk profile more specifically we analyze the impact of market price marketing effort and stocking quantity on customer demand how supplier prices can serve as a coordination mechanism in a supply chain setting integrating alternative supplier pricing policies within the newsvendor framework and how the buyer s risk profile moderates the newsvendor order quantity decision for each of these areas we summarize the current literature and develop extensions finally we also propose directions for future research

decision bias in the newsvendor problem with a known demand distribution experimental evidence in the newsvendor problem a decision maker orders inventory before a one period selling season with stochastic demand if too much is ordered stock is left over at the end of the period whereas if too little is ordered sales are lost the expected profit maximizing order quantity is well known but little is known about how managers actually make these decisions we describe two experiments that investigate newsvendor decisions across different profit conditions results from these studies demonstrate that choices systematically deviate from those that maximize expected profit subjects order too few of high profit products and too many of low profit products these results are not consistent with risk aversion risk seeking preferences prospect theory preferences waste aversion stockout aversion or the consequences of underestimating opportunity costs two explanations are consistent with the data one subjects behave as if their utility function incorporates a preference to reduce ex post inventory error the absolute difference between the chosen quantity and realized demand two subjects suffer from the anchoring and insufficient adjustment bias feedback and training did not mitigate inventory order errors we suggest techniques to improve decision making

how did health care reform in massachusetts impact insurance premiums it is widely recognized that the 2006 massachusetts health reforms served as a blueprint for national reform under the 2010 affordable care act aca as such there is interest in using the massachusetts experience to understand how insurance premiums might change under the aca in this paper we analyze changes in private insurance premiums in massachusetts between 2002 and 2010 in contrast to earlier estimates from massachusetts cogan hubbard and kessler 2010 we find no statistical evidence of changes in group premiums by contrast we find large reductions in non group premiums in massachusetts relative to the rest of the u s

does health reform affect self employment evidence from massachusetts this paper evaluates whether the implementation of the 2006 massachusetts health reform law affected the decision of taxpayers to be self employed using both difference in differences and synthetic control methods on a panel of tax returns that spans 1999 2010 though tenuous our results suggest that the reform led to a decline in the rate of taxpayers earning a majority of income from self employment in addition it appears to have had a positive impact on earning some self employment income among joint filers and earning the majority of income from self employment among older taxpayers but these were offset by negative impacts on single filers and taxpayers age 35 49

optimal order quantity and pricing decisions in single period inventory systems abstract in this paper we consider simultaneous pricing and procurement decisions associated with a one period pure inventory model under deterministic or probabilistic demand we investigate the necessary and sufficient conditions for an type policy to be optimal for the determination of the procurement quantity we also show how the corresponding optimal price can be obtained

how has small group market reform affected employee health insurance coverage abstract in the early 1990s over 40 states passed legislation designed to limit a number of exclusionary practices by insurers in the small group market in order to improve the availability and affordability of health insurance to employees in small firms in this paper we address the effects of reform on the likelihood that workers are offered insurance have employment based coverage or are policyholders of an employment based plan we use differences in differences dd and differences in differences in differences ddd estimators to evaluate the differential effects of alternative reform measures on high and low risk workers we generally find little effect of reform on offer rates and find that in states with the most stringent reform employment based coverage and policyholder rates increased for high risk workers relative to low risk workers our results also indicate that the effects of reform varied significantly by the extent to which states adopted guaranteed issue