Note on "MYOPIC HEURISTICS FOR THE RANDOM YIELD PROBLEM"

Abstract

Bollapragada and Morton (1999) present several well-performing heuristics for solving the periodic inventory problem with random yield and demand. Their approach is essentially based on a transformation of the single-period problem into a standard newsvendor problem with deterministic yield and random demand which, however, is supply-dependent. In our note, we show that their evaluation of the respective optimality condition is not correct. This explains the steady deterioration of their myopic heuristics for parameter constellations that correspond to increasing service levels. Some computational investigations reveal that the performance of the heuristics can become quite poor if service levels exceed the upper bounds for which results are reported in the original study.