T life cycle of new products is becoming shorter and shorter in all markets. For electronic products, life cycles are measured in units of months, with 6to 12-month life cycles being common. Given these short product life cycles, product demand is increasingly difficult to forecast. Furthermore, demand is never really stationary because the demand rate evolves over the life of the product. In t...

s from the important role that expectations of future events, such as policy adjustments, play in the problem of time inconsistency. 8 Some analysts argue for rules that adjust another instrument of monetary policy, the monetary base, to keep nominal GDP on target (McCallum 1987, 1988). Interest rate-based rules offer the advantage that they involve little change from the Fed’s current policy-s...

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product whose demand distribution in each period is determined both by whether or not a sale price is offered in the current period, and the number of periods since the last time the sale price was offered. We show that optimal inventory ordering policy is a state dependent base stock policy; however, the optimal pricing p...

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: E31 E44 E52 Keywords: Monetary policy rule Nonlinear model Stock market Structural break Time-varying coefficient This paper introduces nonlinearity and a structural break to the US forward-looking Taylor rule with a stock price gap, thereby alleviating the robustness problem that the linear Taylor rule is sensitive to minor changes of the sample period...

We study the joint inventory and sales effort management problems of a retailer in a broad context and investigate the optimal policies for a single item, periodic-review system. In each period, the demand is uncertain depending on the sales effort level exerted by the retailer, which incurs an associated cost. The retailer’s objective is to find a joint optimal inventory replenishment and sale...

We address several aspects related to managing re-entrant lines in an uniied manner { capacity allocation, inventory management and production control { in a set of three papers. Our approach to study these systems is through simulation based optimization. Simulation ooers the exibility to model the complexities adequately while the gradient computation (via Innnitesimal Perturbation Analysis) ...

We investigate the situation where a customer experiencing an inventory stockout at a retailer potentially leaves the firm’s market. In classical inventory theory, a unit stockout penalty cost has been used as a surrogate to mimic the economic effect of such a departure; in this study we explicitly represent this aspect of consumer behavior, incorporating the diminishing effect of the consumers...

W consider a multiproduct assemble-to-order (ATO) system, in which inventory is kept only at the component level and the finished products are assembled in response to customer demands. In addition to stochastic demand for finished products, the system experiences stochastic returns of subsets of components, which can then be used to satisfy subsequent demands. The system is managed over an inf...

We consider the joint pricing and inventory decision problem for a single retailer who orders, stocks and sells multiple products. The products are competitive in nature, e.g., these maybe similar products from multiple brands. Demand for a product depends on its price as well as the price of all competing products. We show that the optimal pricing and inventory policy is similar to the base-st...