The impact of price skimming on supply and exit decisions

Abstract

Stochastic inventory control theory has focused on the order and/or pricing policy when the length of the selling period is known. In contrast to this focus, we examine the optimal length of the selling period - which we refer to as market exit time - in the context of a novel inventory replenishment problem faced by a supplier of a new, trendy, and relatively expensive product with a short life cycle. An important characteristic of the problem is that the supplier applies a price skimming strategy over time and the demand is modeled as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process with an intensity that is dependent on time. The supplier's problems of finding the optimal order quantity and market exit time, with the objective of maximizing expected profit, is studied. Procedures are proposed for joint optimization of the objective function with respect to the order quantity and the market exit time. Then, the effects of the order quantity and market exit time on the supplier's profitability are explored on the basis of a quantitative investigation.