文献类型： 外文期刊

作者： Marschak, Thomas ¹ ; Shanthikumar, J. George ² ; Zhou, Junjie ³ ;

作者机构： 1.Univ Calif Berkeley, Walter A Haas Sch Business, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA

2.Purdue Univ, Krannert Sch Management, W Lafayette, IN 47907 USA

3.Shanghai Univ Finance & Econ, Sch Int Business Adm, Shanghai 20043, Peoples R China

关键词： newsvendor;inventory management;information gathering;demand forecasting

期刊名称：PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT （ 影响因子：4.965； 五年影响因子：5.298 ）

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收录情况： SCI

摘要： We study a newsvendor who can acquire the services of a forecaster, or, more generally, an information gatherer (IG) to improve his information about demand. When the IG's effort increases, does the average ex ante order quantity rise or fall? Do average ex post sales rise or fall? Improvements in information technology and in the services offered by forecasters provide motivation for the study of these questions. Much depends on our model of the IG and his efforts. We study an IG who sends a signal to a classic single-period newsvendor. The signal defines the newsvendor's posterior probability distribution on the possible demands and the newsvendor uses that posterior to calculate the optimal order. Each of the possible posteriors is a scale/location transform of the same base distribution. When the IG works harder, the average scale parameter drops. Higher IG effort is always useful to the newsvendor. We show that there is a critical value of order cost. For costs on one side of this value more IG effort leads to a higher average ex ante order and for costs on the other side to a lower average order. But for all costs, more IG effort leads to higher average ex post sales. We obtain analogous results for a regret-averse newsvendor who suffers a penalty that is a nonlinear function of the discrepancy between quantity ordered and true demand.