Optimal pricing of perishable products with replenishment policy in the presence of strategic consumers

Recognizing that strategic consumers have become increasingly common in the perishable products market, we develop a two-stage pricing model for a monopolistic firm with two classes of inventory strategies: non-replenishment and replenishment. First, the retailer mapping out his pricing policy, and then consumers determining their buying behavior given the retailers policy. Our results indicate that the game equilibrium exists between retailers and consumers in both cases. For a given realized price and inventory policy, the consumer's space is split into several areas by the optimal threshold functions. Inventory replenishment decisions are affected by market demand and a decline factor of consumers reservation value. The retailers profit loss is not necessarily related to the consumers waiting behavior but results from the ignorance of this behavior when pricing.