On Implications of Demand Censoring in the Newsvendor Problem

Management Science, June 2013, Vol. 59, No. 6, 1407-1424

Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 12-7

44 Pages Posted: 12 Jan 2012 Last revised: 13 Jul 2013

See all articles by Omar Besbes

Omar Besbes

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Decision Risk and Operations

Alp Muharremoglu

University of Texas at Dallas - Naveen Jindal School of Management

Date Written: January 12, 2010

Abstract

We consider a repeated newsvendor problem in which the decision-maker (DM) does not have access to the underlying demand distribution. The goal of the paper is to characterize the implications of demand censoring on performance. To that end, we compare the benchmark setting in which the DM has access to demand observations to a setting in which the DM may only rely on sales data. We measure performance in terms of regret: the difference between the cumulative costs of a policy and the optimal cumulative costs with knowledge of the demand distribution. Through upper and lower bounds, we characterize the optimal magnitude of the worst case regret for the two settings, enabling one to isolate the implications of demand censoring. In particular, the results imply that the exploration-exploitation trade-off introduced by demand censoring is fundamentally different in the continuous and discrete demand cases, and that active exploration plays a much stronger role in the latter case. We further establish that in the discrete demand case, the need for active exploration almost disappears as soon as a lost sales indicator (that records whether demand was censored or not) becomes available, in addition to the censored demand samples.

Keywords: inventory management, newsvendor, estimation, nonparametric, demand censoring

Suggested Citation

Besbes, Omar and Muharremoglu, Alp, On Implications of Demand Censoring in the Newsvendor Problem (January 12, 2010). Management Science, June 2013, Vol. 59, No. 6, 1407-1424, Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 12-7, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1983270 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1983270

Omar Besbes (Contact Author)

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Decision Risk and Operations ( email )

New York, NY
United States

Alp Muharremoglu

University of Texas at Dallas - Naveen Jindal School of Management ( email )

800 W Campbell Rd
SM 30
Richardson, TX 75080
United States

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