Dynamic Pricing Startegies for Discrete Perishable Products
(R2022-111831)

AUTHORS

Oleg Melnikov, National Technical University "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute"

ABSTRACT

The paper is devoted to the development of a dynamic pricing strategy for the sale of products whose value expires with time. Sales of discrete goods to heterogeneous consumers who have at most a unit demand for sold goods is considered. This type of demand structure makes it possible to describe the optimal pricing strategy using a simple system of recursive equations, which allows for an analytical solution in some special cases. For the general case, a numerical algorithm has been developed for finding the optimal solution as a function of time to expiration and remaining stocks of unsold products. The proposed strategy is compared with the fixed-price policy and estimates of economic gain from employing dynamically adjusted prices are obtained. Simple heuristics for sales management under conditions of incomplete information are also proposed.