Joint pricing and inventory control with a Markovian demand model

We consider the joint pricing and inventory control problem for a single product with a finite horizon and periodic review. The demand distribution in each period is determined by an exogenous Markov chain. Pricing and ordering decisions are made at the beginning of each period and all shortages are backlogged. The surplus costs as well as fixed and variable costs are state dependent. We show the existence of an optimal (s, S, p)-type feedback policy for the additive demand model. We extend the model to the case of emergency orders and also incorporate capacity and service level constraints. We compute the optimal policy for a class of Markovian demand and illustrate the benefits of dynamic pricing over fixed pricing strategies through numerical examples. The results indicate that it is more beneficial to implement the dynamic pricing strategy in a Markovian demand environment with a high fixed ordering cost or with high demand uncertainty.

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