Copyright © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Production, Manufacturing and Logistics
Effects of a demand-curve’s shape on the optimal solutions of a multi-echelon inventory/pricing model
Received 3 May 2001;
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Abstract
When a price–demand relationship is needed in inventory/pricing models, very often a convenient (typically linear) function is arbitrarily chosen. The common-wisdom implication is that any downward-sloping demand curve would lead to similar conclusions. This paper applies different demand-curve functions to a simple inventory/pricing model, and shows that while the common-wisdom implication is valid for a single-echelon system, assuming different demand-curve functions can lead to very different results in a multi-echelon system. In some situations, a very small change in the demand-curve appearance leads to very large changes in the model’s optimal solutions. Other significant but counter-intuitive effects of the demand-curve form are also revealed. This paper does not completely resolve the difficulties revealed by the counter-intuitive effects reported here, but establishing the existence of these effects represents a first step towards developing procedures to handle such effects; these procedures will be necessary to ensure the reliability of many multi-echelon models for products having price-sensitive demands.
Author Keywords: Supply chain management; Pricing; Retailing; Inventory
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Brief summary of the single-echelon situation
- 3. The two-echelon situation
- 4. The three-echelon situation
- 5. An often overlooked property of the linear demand curve
- 5.1. Proof that “d=a−bp” can represent the same market condition for any (a, b)-value
- 5.2. Extensions
- 6. Combining linear and iso-elastic demand curves
- 6.1. Confirming the earlier results and achieving a wider range of (θM*/θR*) and CE values
- 6.2. Additional complications
- 6.3. A closer look on how the demand curves affect θhM*, θhR* and phR*
- 7. An illustration of the effect of assuming different demand curves
- 8. Summary and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- References






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