A PRICING-INVENTORY MODEL FOR PERISHABLE PRODUCTS WITH MULTIVARIATE-DEPENDENT DEMAND FUNCTION AND TIME-INCREASING-LINEAR HOLDING COST FUNCTION

Setting a xed price to a perishable product convinces customers to purchase fresher products and keep a portion of inventory unsold. However, pricing with respect to the time of expiring date can increase the demand rate of aged products and decrease the amount of waste. Having the price elasticity of demand and its impact on inventory management, especially for perishable products, makes investigating the pricing and inventory problems simultaneously an eective way for reducing costs and increasing the total prot. Pricing itself is considered as a mechanism to attract more customers and improve the retailer's total prot. Nowadays, the rise of health-conscious customers has led to increased demand for fresh products. The demand for these products depends on the selling price, freshness, and the displayed stock level. As the age of the perishable product increases, more attempts are needed to maintain the freshness of these products, increasing the holding cost over time, i.e., the older the product, the higher the holding cost. Due to dependence of demand rate on displayed stock level, the optimal value of ending inventory is not necessarily zero and another challenge is to decide on what is the optimal inventory level at the end of a replenishment cycle. This research investigates a pricinginventory problem with a multiplicative demand function of price, freshness, and displayed stock level when the holding cost function is linearly time-increasing. A mathematical model is proposed to determine the replenishment cycle time, the ending inventory level, discounted selling price, the economic order quantity, and the time to apply the discount to maximize the retailer's total prot. It is shown that the objective function of type prot maximization is quasi-concave, and a search algorithm is presented based on this. Finally, an example is applied to show the well-dened structure of the model. The sensitivity of some important parameters is analyzed to illustrate theoretical and managerial aspects.