Optimal Ordering and Pricing Policies for Seasonal Products: Impacts of Demand Uncertainty and Capital Constraint

Abstract

With a stochastic price-dependent market demand, this paper investigates how demand uncertainty and capital constraint affect retailer's integrated ordering and pricing policies towards seasonal products. The retailer with capital constraint is normalized to be with zero capital endowment while it can be financed by an external bank. The problems are studied under a low and high demand uncertainty scenario, respectively. Results show that when demand uncertainty level is relatively low, the retailer faced with demand uncertainty always sets a lower price than the riskless one, while its order quantity may be smaller or larger than the riskless retailer's which depends on the level of market size. When adding a capital constraint, the retailer will strictly prefer a higher price but smaller quantity policy. However, in a high demand uncertainty scenario, the impacts are more intricate. The retailer faced with demand uncertainty will always order a larger quantity than the riskless one if demand uncertainty level is high enough (above a critical value), while the capital-constrained retailer is likely to set a lower price than the well-funded one when demand uncertainty level falls within a specific interval. Therefore, it can be further concluded that the impact of capital constraint on the retailer's pricing decision can be influenced by different demand uncertainty levels. Hindawi Publishing CorporationDiscrete Dynamics in Nature and Society decisions on ordering, pricing, and financing, which is not observed in existing literature. The main contributions and conclusions of this paper are as follows.(1) Studying Retailer's Integrated Decisions on Ordering, Pricing, and Financing. With introducing pricing decision into the "capital-constrained newsvendor" problem, this paper investigates the retailer's integrated ordering and pricing decisions in the presence of capital constraint. Results show that when market size is extremely small, the retailer will not borrow from the bank to order any quantity. Otherwise, it will borrow to order and its optimal order quantity and selling price can be uniquely determined.(2) Investigating the Impacts of Demand Uncertainty and Capital Constraint on Retailer's Optimal Ordering and Pricing Policies. Three models (i.e., the riskless model, uncertainty model, and uncertainty-underfunded model) are developed and in-depth comparisons of optimal solutions in three models are carried out to reveal how demand uncertainty and capital constraint affect retailer's integrated ordering and pricing policies. The problems are studied in a low and high demand uncertainty scenario, respectively, which is differentiated by an ingenious method, and plenty of conclusions are obtained through both theoretical analyses and numerical studies.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the review of related literature. Section 3 describes the problem and provides the model notations and assumptions. Section 4 formulates three models and derives the optimal solutions. Sectio...

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