A Robust Conjecture on the Relationship among the Expected Profits of Various Newsvendor Models

The present study provides some extensions over a recent work in Won (2011) which investigates properties of the static newsvendor problem under a schedule involving progressive multiple discounts under the assumption that demand is given exogenously. Khouja (1995, 1996) formulated the extended versions over the classical newsvendor model with various discount policies including all-units discount and/or multiple discounts and found that the extended newsvendor models with discount schedules yield higher optimal expected profits than the classical newsvendor model with no-discounts. In this study, we establish a robust conjecture as a stronger statement than Khouja’s findings with regard to the general relationship among the expected profits of newsvendor models in the sense that the conjecture holds for every order quantity as well as the optimal order quantity. The conjecture encourages the newsvendor facing quantity discounts to safely implement her own discounts policy to customer or accept quantity discounts offered by the supplier even if the optimal order quantity cannot be ordered due to additional restrictions such as budget or warehouse capacity constraints because the newsvendor models with quantity discounts always yield higher expected profit than the classic newsvendor model without quantity discounts regardless of the order quantity. Results from wide experiments with various probability distributions of demand strongly support our conjecture.