• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.13-21
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• 2012

In this note, a recent work in Won (2011) which investigates properties of the newsvendor model under progressive multiple discounts is revisited and a complete proof is provided for the conjecture on the consistent advantage of progressive multiple discounts over no-discounts in terms of the expected profit. The proof considers the generalized newsvendor model under progressive multiple discounts extended with positive shortage cost and salvage value which have not been considered in the previous newsvendor models under progressive multiple discounts. Without relying on derivatives, we prove that the expected profit under progressive multiple discounts are consistently greater than or equal to the one under no-discounts for every order quantity as far as her multiple discounts do not decrease customer demand, and therefore, the optimal expected profit under progressive multiple discounts is always greater than or equal to the one under no-discounts. As by-products from the proof, some interesting features of the generalized newsvendor model under progressive multiple discounts are revealed.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.27-43
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• 2011

This paper investigates properties of the newsvendor problem under a schedule involving progressive multiple discounts compared with the standard newsvendor problem under a no-discounts schedule. Unlike most conventional approaches using the criticial fractile to analyze the retailer and/or supplier behavior(s) in the newsvendor problem, our approach uses riskless profit. From the properties revealed through a series of computational experiments, two conjectures regarding the relationship between the expected profits of both newsvendor problems as a generalization over Khouja's argument (1995) are raised. Those conjectures encourage newsvendors who may face budget or warehouse capacity restriction to use the extended model under a multiple-discounts schedule rather than the standard model with no-discounts schedule because they apply for every order quantity as well as the optimal order quantity. In addition to the conjectures, some insightful results are found to justify the implementation of a multiple-discounts schedule from the computational experiments and a new interpretation for implementation of a multiple-discounts schedule that has not been addressed in Khouja is provided.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2012

The present study provides some extensions over a recent work in Won (2011) which investigates properties of the static newsvendor problem under a schedule involving progressive multiple discounts under the assumption that demand is given exogenously. Khouja (1995, 1996) formulated the extended versions over the classical newsvendor model with various discount policies including all-units discount and/or multiple discounts and found that the extended newsvendor models with discount schedules yield higher optimal expected profits than the classical newsvendor model with no-discounts. In this study, we establish a robust conjecture as a stronger statement than Khouja's findings with regard to the general relationship among the expected profits of newsvendor models in the sense that the conjecture holds for every order quantity as well as the optimal order quantity. The conjecture encourages the newsvendor facing quantity discounts to safely implement her own discounts policy to customer or accept quantity discounts offered by the supplier even if the optimal order quantity cannot be ordered due to additional restrictions such as budget or warehouse capacity constraints because the newsvendor models with quantity discounts always yield higher expected profit than the classic newsvendor model without quantity discounts regardless of the order quantity. Results from wide experiments with various probability distributions of demand strongly support our conjecture.