Management of Seasonal Style-Goods Inventories

Abstract

This paper develops an inventory model in which season length is specifically included as a variable for seasonal style goods under the assumption that the demands exhibit a simple contagion pattern, namely, the influence of past demands on future occurrence of demands. The paper first derives an s − S optimal order policy as a function of the selling season, then determines the optimal duration and timing of the selling season, and, finally includes an algorithm for computing the optimal season length.