In 1998, the retail sales and marketing division of Time Inc., the largest publisher of consumer magazines in the US, reviewed its newsstand distribution principles and procedures for its magazines. This review affected the three major distribution decisions: the evaluation of each magazine’s national print order, the wholesaler allotment procedure, and the store distribution process. For this ...

We apply the mean-variance approach to analyze the risk-averse newsvendor problem with stockout cost. We first derive an explicit form and some new properties of the variance of the profit function. Then, under the assumption that demand follows the power distribution, and its special case the uniform distribution, we obtain the set of optimal ordering quantities. We also give a counterexample ...

The single-item stochastic lot-sizing problem is to find an inventory replenishment policy in the presence of discrete stochastic demands under periodic review and finite time horizon. A closely related problem is the single-period newsvendor model. It is well known that the newsvendor problem admits a closed formula for the optimal order quantity whenever the revenue and salvage values are lin...

We consider the problem of a newsvendor that is served by multiple suppliers, where any given supplier may be unreliable. By unreliable we simply mean that the marginal amount received from a supplier is no more than, and typically is less than, the marginal amount ordered from the supplier. In this setting, the newsvendor needs to determine (1) whether or not to place an order with a given sup...