Loss Leading pricing is often referred to as an advertising strategy which allows retailers to attract consumers by subsidizing some products and make profits from other items; in this way, below-cost pricing may improve consumer welfare by compensating consumers for their lack of information. This paper shows that large retailers can instead use loss leading as an exploitative device at the de...

Recently, retailers who directly deal with poultry farmers increase in Japan. It therefore becomes necessary for the poultry farmers to deliver products to the retailers frequently in accordance with the retailers’ demand. The retailer purchases (raw) chicken meat from the poultry farmer. The stock of the poultry farmer increases due to growth, in contrast, the inventory level of the retailer i...

We consider a supply chain consisting of one supplier selling through one retailer who faces a newsvendor problem. There is a positive probability that the retailer is capable of gaining improved demand information through costly forecasting. The supplier would like to induce the retailer to forecast and share that information. Restricting the retailer’s ability to return unsold product would i...

This study considers pricing, production and transportation decisions in a Stackelberg game between three-stage, multi-product, multi-source and single-period supply chains called leader and follower. These chains consist of; manufacturers, distribution centers (DCs) and retailers. Competition type is horizontal and SC vs. SC. The retailers in two chains try to maximize their profit through pri...

In this paper, we examine retailers’ dynamic pricing behavior in a competitive environment, using scanner data on the refrigerated orange juice category. We examine two factors that may result in lower retail prices compared to static optimum prices at categorylevel profit maximization: (i) retailers’ use of a loss leader strategy for national brands to attract more consumers, and (ii) retailer...

With the development of e-commerce, online purchasing has made competitions among retailers fiercer than ever. Access on the internet influences traditional purchasing access inevitably. In this paper, the author uses Hotelling model to simulate the dynamic pricing process between online retailers and off-line retailers by the two steps game model. It gives a straightforward demonstration of th...

The paper considers a stylized model of a dynamic assortment optimization problem, where given a limited capacity constraint, we must decide the assortment of products to offer to customers to maximize the profit. Our model is motivated by the problem faced by retailers of stocking products on a shelf with limited capacities and by the problem of placing a limited number of ads on a web page. W...

In this thesis, we study important facets of two problems in methodological and applied operations research. In the first part of the thesis, motivated by optimization problems that arise in the context of Internet advertising, we explore the performance of the greedy algorithm in solving submodular set function maximization problems over various constraint structures. Most classic results abou...

We analyze retail space-exchange problems where two or more retailers exchange their excess retail spaces to improve the utilization of their space resource. We first investigate the tworetailer space exchange problem. In order to entice both retailers with different bargaining powers to exchange their spaces, we use the generalized Nash bargaining scheme to allocate the total profit surplus be...