Joint pricing and inventory control for a stochastic inventory system with Brownian motion demand Dacheng Yao Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China;
[email protected] Abstract In this paper, we consider an infinite horizon, continuous-review, stochastic inventory system in which cumulative customers' demand is price-dependent and is modeled as a Brownian motion. Excess demand is backlogged. The revenue is earned by selling products and the costs are incurred by holding/shortage and ordering, the latter consists of a fixed cost and a proportional cost. Our objective is to simultaneously determine a pricing strategy and an inventory control strategy to maximize the expected long-run average profit. Specifically, the pricing strategy provides the price pt for any time t ≥ 0 and the inventory control strategy characterizes when and how much we need to order. We show that an (s∗;S∗; p∗) policy is ∗ ∗ optimal and obtain the equations of optimal policy parameters, where p = fpt : t ≥ 0g. ∗ Furthermore, we find that at each time t, the optimal price pt depends on the current inventory level z, and it is increasing in [s∗; z∗] and is decreasing in [z∗; 1), where z∗ is a negative level. Keywords: Stochastic inventory model, pricing, Brownian motion demand, (s; S; p) policy, impulse control, drift rate control. arXiv:1608.03033v2 [math.OC] 11 Jul 2017 1 Introduction Exogenous selling price is always assumed in the classic production/inventory models; see e.g., Scarf(1960) and the research thereafter. In practice, however, dynamic pricing is one important tool for revenue management by balancing customers' demand and inventory level.