The single-period (news-vendor) problem: literature review and suggestionsfor future research

The single-period problem (SPP): also known as the newsboy or news-vendor p roblem, is to find the order quantity which maximizes the expected profit i n a single period probabilistic demand framework. Interest in the SPP remai ns unabated and many extensions to it have been proposed in the last decade . These extensions include dealing with different objectives and utility fu nctions, different supplier pricing policies, different news-vendor pricing policies and discounting structures, different states of information about demand, constrained multi-products, multiple-products with substitution, r andom yields, and multi-location models. This paper builds a taxonomy of th e SPP literature and delineates the contribution of the different SPP exten sions. This paper also suggests some future directions for research. (C) 19 99 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.