Inventory systems in the presence of an electronic market place

Abstract

a??Spot shopsa?? in electronic marketplaces (EMs) provide companies alternative supply sources and opportunities to salvage excess inventory, which helps to reduce their inventory costs. This dissertation focuses on studying inventory systems in the presences of an EM.A single level periodic review inventory system in the presence of an EM is investigated first. The optimal inventory control policy is obtained for a special case and heuristic policies are proposed for general cases. This inventory system is extended to investigate impacts of an EM among multiple independent retailers. It is found that each individual retailer can obtain cost saving and the aggregated system can also obtain inventory cost saving from the EM. Finally, an inventory system in the presence of an EM for perishable products with auto-correlated demands is studied. The impacts of various demand processes on the cost saving from the EM are analyzed.