Joint Decision On Inventory,Pricing And Advertising For Retailers Based On Strategic Customers

In the current business environment,merchants often take various promotional activities to enhance their competitiveness.This move makes consumers' decisions more and more strategic.They call them strategic customers.In the process of buying and selling perishable goods,the customer's strategic behavior is particularly evident.Affected by the product life cycle,retailers have to process the remaining inventory at the end of the season.At this time,consumers can strategically choose the opportunity to maximize their utility.In this severe market,perishable goods retailers often use advertising to stimulate demand and expand the market base.In addition to advertising,because the market is mostly price-sensitive customers,prices also play a decisive role in demand.At the same time,retailers also need to make inventory decisions at the beginning of the period.Based on the above background,in the face of strategic customers,the joint decision of retailers on how to carry out inventory,pricing and advertising investment has become an urgent problem to be solved.Based on the market background of strategic customers,this paper studies the optimal inventory,price,and advertising investment decisions of perishable goods retailers,and analyzes the influence of strategic customer behaviors on these decisions.For this reason,the article considers two situations in which demand is affected by advertising and demand is affected by advertising and price,and in each case,the addition demand form and the multiplication demand form are assumed separately.By constructing the retailer's decision-making model and consumer's decision-making model under two kinds of situations,using mathematical optimization and numerical analysis methods,combined with rational expectations equilibrium theory in economics,the retailer's optimal decision is given.Further,we present the optimal decision-making behavior when retailers face short-sighted customers in two situations.Through the static comparison of retailer's optimal decisions when faced with different types of customers,the strategic customer behavior is analyzed for retailing of perishables.The influence of commercial best decisions.The study finds that when the demand is affected by advertising,the retailer's optimal pricing should fully follow the rational expectation equilibrium condition.Based on this,it combines the retailer's decision-making model,and gives the optimal order quantity and the decision of advertising investment level.Regardless of whether the level of advertising investment influences the demand in the form of addition or multiplication,the strategic customer behavior will lead to the reduction of the retailer's optimal inventory,price,and advertising investment.When the demand is affected by advertising and prices,the price decision made by the rational expectation condition may not be able to maximize the profit.Therefore,the optimal price decision at this time should meet both the rational expectation principle and the profit maximization principle,in which the optimal price decision is made.Based on the retailer's profit function,it can give retailers optimal inventory and advertising investment decisions.When analyzing the influence of strategic customers on the retailer's decision at this time,it is found that there is an inventory factor threshold.When the inventory factor is higher than the threshold,the strategic customer behavior will still lead to the decline of the retailer's optimal decision,but when the inventory factor is low.At this threshold,strategic customer behavior does not adversely affect retailer decisions,meaning that retailers can ignore strategic customers for decision making at this time.The above conclusions have enriched the research results of strategic customers in the field of operations to some extent,and provided a theoretical basis for the decision-making of retailers in actual business activities.According to the research conclusion,retailers can appropriately reduce inventory levels in the face of strategic customers,adopt limited supply strategies to enhance the sense of crisis of strategic customers,thus prompting them to purchase in advance.