Abstract Reputation plays an important role in assuring product quality in markets where consumers can only imperfectly judge the quality before consumption. For the retailer, reputation is a valuable asset, as consumers are more likely to trust a company that has a sound reputation. The existing literature on inventory management rarely considers demand as being affected by reputation. In this study, we develop an operational research approach in which the demand rate is affected by the price, remaining shelf-life, and retailer's reputation, as well as by the heterogeneity of consumers in terms of their sensitivity to the latter two factors. We represent the retailer's reputation by the overall average freshness level of the products sold on his shelf (obtained from records), while the retailer's objective is to maximize his profit. Our analysis shows that the optimal pricing policy is only indirectly associated with the retailer's reputation (i.e., overall average freshness level), via the replenishment strategy. We demonstrate analytically that the retailer does not always prefer to achieve a higher reputation level, as this incurs higher costs due to faster replenishment. We show numerically that consumers are barely affected by their own heterogeneity; that is, the selling price barely changes and the retailer's reputation level shows only modest differences, compared with the baseline scenario (homogeneous sensitivities). The retailer, however, is significantly affected, experiencing either an increase or decrease in profits (relative to the baseline) depending on the specific distributions used to model consumer sensitivity values.

中文翻译：

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在对零售商声誉敏感度不同的市场下管理即将到期的产品

摘要 在消费者在消费前不能完全判断质量的市场中，声誉对保证产品质量起着重要作用。对于零售商而言，声誉是一项宝贵的资产，因为消费者更有可能信任声誉良好的公司。现有的库存管理文献很少将需求视为受声誉的影响。在这项研究中，我们开发了一种运筹学方法，其中需求率受价格、剩余保质期和零售商声誉的影响，以及消费者对后两个因素的敏感性的异质性。我们用货架上销售的产品的整体平均新鲜度（从记录中获得）来代表零售商的声誉，而零售商的目标是最大化他的利润。我们的分析表明，最优定价策略仅通过补货策略与零售商的声誉（即整体平均新鲜度）间接相关。我们通过分析证明零售商并不总是希望获得更高的声誉水平，因为由于更快的补货而导致更高的成本。我们从数字上表明，消费者几乎不受其自身异质性的影响；也就是说，与基准情景（同质敏感性）相比，销售价格几乎没有变化，零售商的声誉水平仅显示出适度的差异。然而，零售商受到显着影响，根据用于建模消费者敏感度值的特定分布，利润会增加或减少（相对于基线）。