A newsvendor model with service and loss constraints

Actual performance measurement systems do not only consider financial measures like costs and profits but also non-financial indicators with respect customer service, quality and flexibility. Using the newsvendor model we explore the influence of possibly conflicting performance measures on important operations decisions like the order quantity and the selling price of a product. For price-independent as well as price-dependent demand distribution like in the classical newsvendor model the objective is to maximise the expected profit. But the optimal decisions are computed with respect to a service constraint – a lower bound for the level of product availability – and to a loss constraint – an upper bound for the probability of resulting in loss. For the price-independent model a condition for the existence of an optimal order quantity and its structure is presented. For the price-setting newsvendor the admissible region of the order quantity and the selling price is characterised for the additive and the multiplicative model. Furthermore, it is shown that higher variability of demand leads to a smaller admissible region of the decision variables thereby easing the computation of the optimal decisions.