含参考价格效应的定价与库存管理联合策略研究

Pricing and inventory control play the critical roles in the enterprise management. And their coordination significantly influences the profit that companies ought to achieve. Coordinated pricing and inventory models have enjoyed a rapid growth in the past decade. The academics in response developed and analyzed a variety of mathematical models that integrate the two kinds of decisions. Nevertheless, the major stream of revenue management literature and almost all existing inventory management models exclusively assume that the demand of a period only depends on the selling price at the current period. This assumption ignores that consumers may react to companies' pricing strategies hence is inappropriate to model customers' repeating purchasing behavior. Thanks to recent advances in sophisticated information technologies such as enterprise resource planning systems, companies are now able to effectively gather information from customers on their purchase behaviors with a relatively small amount of effort. Basing on such information, this project will aim to the associated coordinated pricing and inventory management decisions. Specifically, we will consider a so-called reference price model which assumes consumers may form a reference price through the observed historic prices to evaluate the selling price before purchasing in the current period: If the selling pirce is lower than the reference price, then consumers perceive this as a gain, and otherwise they perceive it as a loss. Therefore demand depends on not only the current selling price but also the reference price. In addition, we also focus on the loss-averse case, that is, consumers are more sensitive to losses than gains. Indeed, the loss averse assumption is consistent with the prospect theory in economics and has also been validated by many empirical studies. .Reference price effect is now accepted as an empirical generalization in the marketing and economic literature. ..The purpose of this project is to study how managers can take reference price effect into consideration to achieve a more accurate judgement on the aggregate demand and hence a more profitable decision. We hope the studying on characterizations of the optimal policy and associated topics on this problem can greatly promote companies' competitiveness through more effective management.

产品定价和库存控制是管理中两种非常核心的决策行为，对企业实现其最大化利润有着重要影响。目前，学术界和众多企业已经对于这两种决策的联动问题进行了广泛的研究工作。但这些研究工作通常简单假定产品需求只受到其当前定价的影响，其原因在于过去受到技术能力和成本的限制，无法对消费者的购买行为进行更全面的分析考量。近年来，随着信息技术的快速发展，企业可以低成本地获取和保存顾客的消费购买记录，有效地分析其行为模式。如何以此为基础进行更有效的产品定价-库存管理，则是本项目研究的重点。具体而言，我们将考虑一类具有参考价格效应的需求模型，并在假定消费者对收益的偏好不超过对同等数量损失的偏好的前提下，分析相应的最优定价-库存管理策略。值得一提的是，该需求模型已经在市场营销和经济学中得到了广泛的理论和实证支持，在运筹管理范畴中却还没有引起足够重视。本项目希望通过对此问题的研究，帮助企业更有效地进行供应链管理。