In this paper, an inventory management with selling by Internet auctions and purchasing by reverse auctions is studied in the context of e-commerce. The considered inventory management has the following two characteristics. One is that the retailer sells products by Internet auctions, another one is that the retailer makes procurement management by reverse auctions. For the single-period case, it is shown that the retailer's expected revenue is a strictly increasing and concave function of the purchased quantity under Internet auctions, leading to the retailer's optimal procurement strategy and the suppliers' optimal bidding strategy. For the multi-period case, the optimal control model is first constructed for the retailer by using Markov decision processes. Then, the retailer's optimal procurement strategy is obtained and the suppliers' Bayesian-Nash equilibrium bidding strategies are similar to the base-stock policy. These results not only show the effect of auction mechanism on optimal procurement strategy for the retailer, but also provide an important reference for managers to manage inventory under selling by Internet auctions and purchasing by reverse auctions.
LIU Shu-ren, TANG Pei, HUANG Ying-na
. Inventory Management with Selling by Internet Auctions and Purchasing by Reverse Auctions[J]. Chinese Journal of Management Science, 2015
, 23(11)
: 62
-69
.
DOI: 10.16381/j.cnki.issn1003-207x.2015.11.008
[1] Tunay I T, Wu Qiong. Multiple sourcing and procurement process selection with bidding events[J]. Management Science, 2009, 55(5):763-780.
[2] van Ryzin G, Vulcano G. Optimal auctioning and ordering in an infinite horizon inventory-pricing system[J]. Operations Research, 2004, 52(3):346-367.
[3] Huh W T, Janakiraman G. Inventory management with auctions and other sales channels:Optimality of (s, S) policies[J]. Management Science, 2008, 54(1):139-150.
[4] Huh W T, Janakiraman G. (s, S) Optimality in joint inventory-pricing control:An alternative approach[J]. Operations Research, 2008, 56(3):783-790.
[5] Liu Shuren, Hu Qiying, Xu Yifan. Optimal inventory control with fixed ordering cost for selling by Internet auctions[J]. Journal of Industrial and Management Optimization, 2012, 8(1):19-40.
[6] Chen Fangruo.Auctioning supply contracts[J]. Management Science, 2007, 53(10):1562-1576.
[7] Li Cuihong, Scheller-Wolf A. Push or pull? Auctioning supply contracts[J]. Production and Operations Management, 2011, 20(2):198-213.
[8] Gallien J, Wein L M. A smart market for industrial procurement with capacity constraints[J]. Management Science, 2005, 51(1):76-91.
[9] Chaturvedi A, Martinez-de-Albeniz V. Optimal procurement design in the presence of supply risk[J]. Manufaturing and Service Operations Management, 2011, 13(2):227-243.
[10] 姚升保.基于幂效用函数的多属性英式拍卖研究[J].中国管理科学,2013,21(6):132-138.
[11] Pinker E J, Seidmann A, Vakrat Y. Using bid data for the management of sequential, multi-unit, online auctions with uniformly distributed bidder valuations[J]. European Journal of Operational Research, 2010,202(2):574-583.
[12] David H A. Order statistics[M]. 2nd ed. New York:John Wiley and Sons, 1981.
[13] Porteus E L. Foundations of stochastic inventory theory[M]. California:Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002.
