Title
A Data-Driven Newsvendor Problem: From Data to Decision
Abstract
Retailers that order perishable items are required to make ordering decisions for hundreds of products on a daily basis. This task is non-trivial because the risk of ordering too much or too little is associated with overstocking costs and unsatisfied customers. Traditionally, this problem is solved in a two-step procedure. First, the parameters of a given demand distribution are estimated, and second, an optimization problem based on this distribution is solved to obtain the order quantity. However, in reality, the true demand distribution is almost never known to the decision maker. Therefore, we present a novel solution method based on Artificial Neural Networks and Quantile Regression that does not require the assumption of a specifc demand distribution. We provide an empirical evaluation of our method with point-of-sales data for a large German bakery chain. We find that our method outperforms well-established standard approaches in most cases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.2139/ssrn.3090901
Social Science Research Network
Field
DocType
Citations 
Mathematical optimization,Newsvendor model,Data-driven,Exploit,Decision maker,Mathematics,Quantile regression
Journal
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
jakob huber192.04
Sebastian Müller26313.40
Moritz Fleischmann319016.16
Heiner Stuckenschmidt42965237.60