Joint Pricing and Inventory Replenishment Decisions with Returns and Expediting under Reference Price Effects

This paper considers a single-item joint pricing and inventory replenishment problem under reference price effects in consecutive periods. Demands in consecutive periods are sensitive to price and reference price with general demand distribution. At the end of each period, after the demand realization, a firm can return excess stocks to a supplier or place an expediting order to reduce the loss by shortage. Unfilled demands are fully backlogged. In order to maximize the total expected discounted profit with reference price effects the optimal pricing and inventory replenishment policies for regular order and the inventory adjustment decisions for returning/expediting are derived. The optimal replenishment policy for regular order is a base-stock policy, the optimal pricing policy is a base-stock-list-price policy, and the optimal policy for returning/expediting inventory adjustment follows a dual-threshold policy. Furthermore, the analysis of the operational impacts (from the perspective of adding returning/expediting and reference price effects, respectively) is researched. Numerical results also show that considering both returning/expediting and reference price effects is more profitable than considering only one of them.