电子商务环境中,顾客退货是非常普遍的现象,是在线零售企业运营决策不可忽视的重要考虑因素.以此为背景,本文将顾客退货引入到在线零售企业的单周期和多周期定价订货策略研究中.在确定性需求问题中给出了解析解,在随机性需求问题中证明了解的存在唯一性并做了相应的数值试验.试验结果显示:单周期情况下,退货率与在线零售企业定价正相关,而与订货量和收益负相关;价格弹性与在线零售企业定价、收益负相关,对订货量的影响通过一个临界值发生相反的变化;市场随机波动对在线零售企业的决策行为也有很大影响.多周期情况下,在线零售企业会在初始期采取低价高订货量策略,而在末期采取高价低订货量策略,退货率越高,企业总收益越低.同时,针对单周期随机性需求问题,借助期望一方差分析法分析了考虑顾客退货时期望收益的波动,得出风险偏好不同的在线零售企业策略选择有很大不同.无论哪种情况,努力控制顾客退货率都有利于在线零售企业获得高收益.
Customers' returning products is very common in online retailing and it significantly impacts on the seller' s operations decisions. In this paper, we investigate an online retailer who simultaneously determines the retail price and order quantity while experiencing customer returns and price dependent stochastic demand with a multiplicative mode. We assume that the customer' s returned product quantity is a function of both the quantity sold and the price and the online retailer' s operations can be either single or multi-period with and without uncertainty in demand. We analytically derive results for optimal prices and order quantities under cer- tainty demand in both the single and multi-period situations and demonstrate the unique solution existence in the single period stochastic situation. For the multi-period stochastic demand situation, we numerically analyze how the firm should change prices and inventory quantities in order to mitigate the negative effects of returns from customers in the stochastic demand situation. We also model the online retailer' s expected profit with mean-variance to examine the change of the expected revenue with customer' s returns. The risk preference of a retailer has a significant impact on the retailer' s optimal decisions with customer' s returns.