Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences

A definition and classical formulation of the newsboy inventory model as a profit maximization problem is provided. The structure of the optimal stocking policy is given. Alternative formulations of mean-variance, down-side risk, VaR (value-at-risk), and CVaR (conditional value-at-risk) for general demand distributions and a minimax formulation for the distribution-free newsboy model are also presented. Demand estimation in the presence of fully observable and censored sales is discussed from the frequentist and Bayesian perspectives. Explicit formulas are provided for Bayesian updating of a comprehensive set of demand functions.