Managing Clearance Sales in the Presence of Strategic Customers
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the effect of strategic customer behavior on pricing and rationing decisions of a firm selling a single product over two periods. The seller may limit the availability of the product (that is, ration) in the second (clearance) period. Some customers are strategic and respond to the firm's decisions by timing their purchases. When capacity is nonconstraining and the seller has pricing flexibility, we show that rationing in the clearance period cannot improve revenue. However, when prices are fixed in advance, rationing can improve revenue. In the latter case, we conduct a detailed analysis for linear and exponential demand curves and derive explicit expressions for optimal rationing levels. We find that the policy of doing the better of not restricting availability at the clearance price or not offering the product at the clearance price is typically near optimal. Our analysis also suggests that rationing—although sometimes offering considerable benefit over allowing unrestricted availability in the clearance period—may allow the seller to obtain only a small fraction of the optimal revenue when the prices are chosen optimally without rationing. We extend the analysis to cases where the capacity is constraining and obtain similar results.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it