Study On Online Selling Strategy When The Products Arrive One By One

In recent years,the global economic environment has been in the doldrums due to unexpected events,and various uncertain factors frequently appear,increasing the risk of manufacturers’ survival and operation.Among them,price fluctuation is the most intuitive performance of many uncertain factors acting on the market.On the one hand,manufacturers complete the production plan on time;on the other hand,they need to sell as many products as possible at high prices to maximize revenue.However,due to price fluctuations,manufacturers are often faced with whether to sell products at real-time price immediately or to wait and see for a higher price.If the market price rises sharply after the manufacturer sells products or drops sharply after the manufacturer does not sell products,both will suffer considerable losses to the manufacturer.Therefore,it is necessary to study the selling problem in an uncertain price environment.The above selling problem has obvious online characteristics,i.e.,the future prices are uncertain,which we cannot predict accurately,and the manufacturer needs to make real-time decisions.Therefore,we adopt online theory and competitive analysis,the mainstream research method in uncertainty decision-making,to solve the selling problem and design selling strategies.This paper observed that manufacturers often completed producing plan,i.e.,in each cycle,a fixed unit of products will be produced and sold immediately.We describe this phenomenon as the sequential arrival of products,on this basis,this paper depicts two selling problems respectively:Problem 1: Considering that manufacturers adopt the produce-and-sell mode,this paper studies the selling problem when the producing periods are equal to the selling periods.Two online strategies to solve this problem are proven.One named NRPP strategy,a selling strategy with n reservation prices.Another strategy is SAM,the manufacturer chooses to sell products only when the current price is the highest in history price.Then,we prove the competitive ratio of the two strategies and two lower bounds on the competitive ratio are proved to this problem.Problem 2: Considering the phenomena such as traffic control,supply chain interruption,and the failure of staffing to arrive on time after various emergencies,the production activity of manufacturers is forced to be interrupted.Based on this,we studied the selling problem under the risk of production interruption.Unlike Problem 1,the producing periods in this problem will be less than the selling periods,and the total length of the trading horizon is unknown beforehand.To solve this problem,we propose online strategies ON and SAMN,respectively,and then prove the competitive ratio of the two strategies.Finally,a lower bound on the competitive ratio for this online problem is also proved.Finally,this paper carries out a numerical simulation test using the Matlab program and gives the numerical results of the theoretical competitive ratio of each strategy and the lower bound on the competitive ratio.The selling process of each strategy is also simulated,and the sensitivity analysis of the parameters is carried out.Then,this paper gives suggestions on choosing a strategy for manufacturers from strategy competitiveness,strategy stability,and strategy revenue.The study of this paper theoretically expands the basic mode of time series search,and broadens the application of this problem in economics.In practical application,the selling strategies proposed in this paper can provide some reference for the decision-makers.