Approximating partial inverse moments for certain normal variates with an application to decaying inventories

This paper considers the problem of computing E(X−n; X > t) when X is a normal variate having the property that the mean is substantially larger than the standard deviation. An approximation is developed which is determined from the mean, standard deviation, and the cumulative standard normal distribution. Computations comparing the approximate moments with the actual are reported for various values of the relevant parameters. These results are applied to the problem of computing the expected number of shortages in a lead-time for a single product which exhibits continuous exponential decay.