1. 주 제 : Complementarity Analysis on a Multi-Item Inventory Model with a Partial Pricing Strategy

2. 연 사 : 김상조박사 (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

3. 내 용 : We study a multi-product joint inventory replenishment and pricing problem to address the common partial pricing strategy on a mix of substitute and complementary products, where the seller controls only a subset of prices. The seller periodically replenishes all the products and controls the selling price of one of them while the other prices are exogenously determined, for example, based on contracts with buyers or suppliers. Although it is common for firms to conduct partial pricing over a mix of economic complements and substitutes, studies in the literature deal with only full pricing of a product line consisting of substitute products to the best of our knowledge. We model the problem as a stochastic dynamic program and discover that the seller's expected profit function has a structure called L-natural-concavity in rescaled units of measure of the products, which is crucial for effective complementarity analysis. This reveals that there always exists an economic relationship between products that the seller should reflect in any optimal operations, and moreover, such a relationship may not be identical to that from the customers' viewpoint. For example, the seller may have to treat a TV product and a home theater system as economic substitutes instead of complements to enhance profit. Optimal decisions should follow a base-stock list-price policy in which there exist a set of ideal values of target inventory levels and the price that can be optimal when current inventory levels are not very high but otherwise should be adjusted with monotone and bounded sensitivities. Our results on counter-intuitive economic complementarity suggest that managers should not just follow the economic relationship from the customers' perspective. We also lay a theoretical foundation for further research into more general problems such as those involving simultaneous pricing of multiple complements and substitutes.

4. 일 시 : 2017년 12월 27일 (수) 오전 11시

5. 장 소 : 39동 325호

6. 문 의 : 문일경교수 (ikmoon@snu.ac.kr)