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Benefits of Risk Pooling
Benefits of Risk Pooling
POMS
10.1111/J.1937-5956.2010.01134.x
r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
DOI
M. Mahdi Tajbakhsh
Department of Industrial Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3J 2X4, Canada, tajbakhsh@dal.ca
e analyze the benefits of inventory pooling in a multi-location newsvendor framework. Using a number of common
demand distributions, as well as the distribution-free approximation, we compare the centralized (pooled) system with
the decentralized (non-pooled) system. We investigate the sensitivity of the absolute and relative reduction in costs to the
variability of demand and to the number of locations (facilities) being pooled. We show that for the distributions considered,
the absolute benefit of risk pooling increases with variability, and the relative benefit stays fairly constant, as long as the
coefficient of variation of demand stays in the low range. However, under high-variability conditions, both measures decrease
to zero as the demand variability is increased. We show, through analytical results and computational experiments, that these
effects are due to the different operating regimes exhibited by the system under different levels of variability: as the
variability is increased, the system switches from the normal operation to the effective and then complete shutdown regimes;
the decrease in the benefits of risk pooling is associated with the two latter stages. The centralization allows the system to
remain in the normal operation regime under higher levels of variability compared to the decentralized system.
Key words: risk pooling; stochastic inventory models; high demand variability; distribution-free approach
History: Received: June 2009; Accepted: December 2009 by Eric Johnson; after 2 revisions.
1. Introduction
When the demands faced by the individual locations are independent and Normally distributed, it is
indeed not hard to show that the benefits of risk
pooling increase with variability (see Example 1 in
section 2). However, the Normal distribution cannot
be a reasonable approximation of the distribution of
demand when the variability is high, since it may lead
to a significant probability of negative demands; for
this reason Silver et al. (1998) present a rule of thumb:
if the coefficient of variation of demand is > 0.5, one
should consider a distribution other than the Normal
distribution. In contrast to the results for the Normal
distribution, Gerchak and He (2003) provide an example where increased variability of the individual
demands reduces the risk pooling benefits. Benjaafar
et al. (2005) show that in the production-inventory
systems (also called make-to-stock queues), inventory
pooling leads to little benefit if the variability of the
location demands is very high. They argue that the
inconsistency between their result and those obtained
for pure inventory systems is partly due to the assumption of independent demands (or lead-time
demands) in the inventory models. However, the
vanishing benefits of inventory pooling are, in fact,
Risk pooling in inventory management, a.k.a. inventory pooling, refers to the consolidation of inventory
across locations into a single (real or virtual) location,
from which the demands at the individual locations
are served. Since one of the primary functions of the
inventory is to protect the system against the variability in demand, one would intuitively expect
inventory pooling to be beneficial, as the centralized
location faces less demand variability (as measured by
the coefficient of variation) than the individual locations. Moreover, since the reduction in variability is
greatest when the demand faced by the individual
locations has high variability, one would expect the
benefits of inventory pooling to increase with the
variability of demand.
It is well known that (in the absence of additional
costs such as transshipment costs and/or increase in
lead times) inventory pooling is indeed beneficial (see
Eppen (1979), Schwarz (1981), Chen and Lin (1989),
and Cherikh (2000) as well as a recent review in Gerchak and He (2003)). However, the behavior of risk
pooling benefits as a function of variability of demand
is less clear-cut.
57
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Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
easy to demonstrate for inventory systems with independent demandssee Example 2 in section 2, as well
as results in sections 3 and 4.
Our paper seeks to shed some light on these seemingly counter-intuitive behaviors. Namely, we want to
understand how the benefits of risk pooling behave
under increasing variability of demand and what accounts for this behavior. To this end, we examine a
simple system consisting of n identical locations facing identically distributed, independent demands and
operating as newsvendor systems (no fixed costs). The
centralized system faces combined demands from the
individual locations with no additional transshipment
costs or increases in lead times. We define two measures of inventory pooling savingsthe absolute and
the relative decrease in costsand analyze how the
benefits of pooling change with the increase in the
variability of demand (at each location) and the number of locations. The analysis is carried out under a
variety of common demand distributions at each location, including the Normal, Uniform, Laplace,
Logistic, Lognormal, Gamma, and Weibull (for a comprehensive discussion on the applicability of different
demand distributions to inventory control, the reader
is referred to Burgin (1975), Silver et al. (1998), and the
references therein). We classify these distributions into
two groups depending on whether the negative demand can occur: Category I distributions (comprised
of the first four on our list) that admit negative demands and Category II distributions (the last three)
that do not. Category I distributions can be analyzed
only under the low demand variability (coefficient of
variation under 0.5), while Category II distributions
can be used under any level of variability. Our main
results can be summarized as follows:
We show, both analytically (where possible) and
numerically (through Monte-Carlo simulations),
that while the absolute benefits of pooling do increase with variability of demand under the lowvariability conditions (as suggested by the intuition and by the analysis for the Normal
distribution), the behavior changes drastically at
higher variability levels. Indeed, the benefits of
pooling (both absolute and relative) decrease rapidly once the coefficient of variation of demand
(at each location) exceeds a certain threshold, and
disappear entirely as the variability continues to
grow. This behavior occurs for all Category II
distributions. With respect to the number of locations being pooled, under a given level of
variability the benefits of pooling do increase
with the number of locations. However, under
high-variability conditions, a certain minimum
number of locations may need to be pooled
before any appreciable benefits of pooling can be
realized.
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Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
p
D
ns, and
pT Nnm;
nsfz , implying that
thus
LT yT co cu
D co cu fz n
1
C 100 1 p
n
p
ns;
3. Effects of Centralization:
Computational Results
In this section, we investigate the behavior of D and C
measures for a number of common distributions of
demand. The distributions we investigate are divided
into two groups: Category I includes distributions that
allow both positive and negative values of demand,
while Category II distributions allow only positive
values of demand. The specific distributions we examine are listed below:
Category I (distributions allowing negative demand):
Normal, Uniform, Laplace, and Logistic.
Category II (non-negative distributions): Lognormal,
Gamma, and Weibull.
Table 1 provides closed-form expressions for calculating the minimum expected cost and the optimal
order-up-to level for all the distributions listed above.
These expressions can be used to evaluate the optimal
costs of the corresponding decentralized systems. To
the best of our knowledge, the expressions for the
Laplace, Logistic, Gamma, and Weibull distributions
have not appeared previously in the literaturethe
1=u l
f (x)
otherwise
if l x u
x 0; y40; k 40
k x k 1 x =yk
e
y y
x 0; y40; k 40
yk x k 1 eyx
Gk
x 0; 1ono 1; B40
p
px m
px m 2
p exp
p
p
1 exp
s 3
s 3
s 3
1oxo 1
"
#
1
lnx n2
p exp
2B2
xB 2p
p
1
2jx mj
p exp
s
s 2
1oxo 1
Lognormal (Gallego
et al. 2007)
Demand distribution
p.d.f.
yG(111/k)
k/y
exp (n1B2/2)
y2G(112/k) m2
k/y2
exp2n B2
expB2 1
s2
s2
(u l)2/12
m
if co cu
if co 4cu
h
i1=k
u
y lnco cc
u
Satisfies Iy =s; k 1 co cc
u
expn z B;
u
where z F1 co cc
u
p
m s p 3 lnccuo
8
>
< m ps ln c 2ccu
o
u
2
>
: m ps ln co2ccu
o
2
p
3cu co s
co cu
y
s2
(l1u)/2
OPT level
Variance
Mean
if co cu
if co 4cu
cu m co y co cu
co cu s2 y f y
m
R y
ex =y dx
r
2
cu m co cu mF z ln 1 sm2
p
s 3
p co
8 h
i
>
< cpu s 1 lnco2ccu
u
2
h
i
>
: cpo s 1 lnco2ccu
o
2
p
3co cu s
co cu
Ly
MIN cost
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
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Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
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Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
As noted earlier, for the Normal, Gamma, and Uniform distributions, the form of fT is known, and thus,
we are able to solve Equation (5) directly. For all other
distributions, we applied the bisection method, implemented in the Mathematica 6 package, to solve
Equation (5). This allows us to determine LT yT and
subsequently to compute D and C. While, in principle,
the same technique could be applied to n42 locations,
the search for yT becomes multi-dimensional and
leads to numerical difficulties. We thus restricted our
experiments in this section to the n 5 2 case.
In our experiments, we set co $1 and m 5 100
units. We tested a wide range of service level values,
from low to high: a 5 0.15, 0.35, 0.55, 0.75, 0.95 (note
that since a cu =co cu
, fixing a implicitly fixes cu
as well).
Tables 2 and 3 contain the results for the service
level value of 0.35 (the results for a 5 0.75 are presented in the Online Supplement, and the results for
a 5 0.15, 0.55, 0.95 are similar and are available on request from the authors). The columns labeled as N
Cost represent the cost of the Normal approximation.
In this approximation, the optimal order-up-to level is
approximated by that of the Normal distribution and
then, the expected cost is evaluated using the actual
demand distribution. Figure 1 depicts the behavior of
D and C as functions of s for the service level 0.35.
The plots in the right side of the figures are for Category II distributions only since CV40.5.
We make the following observations:
For low levels of variability (i.e., when s 50,
which is equivalent to the coefficient of variation
CV 0.5), it can be observed that the Normal
distribution provides an excellent approximation
for all other distributions with respect to the op-
Table 2
Demand distribution
Normal
Uniform
Laplace
Logistic
Standard deviation
N cost
OPT level
After pooling
OPT cost
N cost
OPT level
OPT cost
10
96.15
5.70
194.55
8.06
30
88.44
17.10
183.65
24.18
50
80.73
28.49
172.75
40.29
10
6.10
94.80
6.06
8.25
194.34
8.25
30
18.31
84.41
18.19
24.75
183.03
24.75
50
30.51
74.02
30.31
41.25
171.71
41.24
10
5.23
97.48
5.17
7.68
195.54
7.65
30
15.69
92.43
15.50
23.04
186.62
22.97
50
26.14
87.39
25.83
38.40
177.70
38.28
10
5.50
96.59
5.49
7.96
194.89
7.94
30
16.49
89.76
16.47
23.71
184.70
23.68
50
27.49
82.94
27.46
39.52
174.48
39.51
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
63
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
Table 3
Demand distribution
Lognormal
Gamma
Weibull
After pooling
Standard deviation
N cost
OPT level
OPT cost
N cost
OPT level
OPT cost
10
5.57
95.75
5.57
2.13
7.94
194.15
7.94
3.11
30
15.69
85.54
15.60
5.08
22.79
180.44
22.78
7.96
50
24.07
35.85
74.56
23.76
6.54
165.23
35.79
11.09
70
64.23
30.06
7.02
149.98
46.68
12.83
80
59.55
32.59
7.03
142.68
51.34
13.31
90
55.24
34.78
6.94
135.72
55.54
13.60
100
51.31
36.67
6.79
129.13
59.30
13.74
110
47.73
38.31
6.60
122.95
62.66
13.76
120
44.49
39.72
6.39
117.17
65.68
13.70
3.18
10
5.62
95.87
5.62
2.21
7.98
194.27
7.98
30
16.29
86.10
16.23
5.69
23.41
181.25
23.37
8.63
50
26.00
74.69
25.74
7.88
37.99
166.37
37.80
12.80
70
62.21
33.86
8.78
149.99
51.04
15.67
80
55.78
37.34
8.79
141.36
57.15
16.62
90
49.37
40.41
8.55
132.51
62.89
17.26
100
43.08
43.08
8.08
123.50
68.25
17.59
110
37.02
45.36
7.44
114.42
73.20
17.63
120
31.30
47.26
6.68
105.32
77.76
17.41
10
5.88
97.32
5.85
2.86
8.27
195.67
8.24
3.84
30
17.35
88.31
17.35
7.19
24.36
183.54
24.35
10.07
50
27.56
39.34
75.63
27.41
9.28
168.17
39.25
14.37
70
61.74
35.25
9.52
150.67
52.43
16.81
80
55.06
38.34
9.19
141.55
58.25
17.40
90
48.81
40.93
8.69
132.44
63.51
17.64
100
43.08
43.08
8.08
123.50
68.25
17.59
110
37.92
44.86
7.43
114.89
72.46
17.31
120
33.32
46.32
6.77
106.69
76.21
16.88
imply that as long as the variability of demand remains in the low range, it is not necessary to
determine the actual distribution of demandordering based on the Normal approximation should yield
near-optimal results.
For high levels of variability (i.e., s450 equivalent
to CV40.5), the results are very different. As
noted earlier, only Category II distributions can
be analyzed in this case. First, we observe that for
all the distributions for both the centralized and
the decentralized systems, the optimal order-upto level is decreasing quite rapidly (for a40.5, it
initially increases, peaks, and then decreases rapidly). The absolute savings D initially increases
(up to s 5 100 for the a 5 0.35 case) but then begins to decline rapidly. While the decline is most
pronounced for the Gamma distribution (D actually reaches 0 in this case), the general tendency is
the same for all Category II distributions. The
relative savings C declines rapidly (for a40.5, it
64
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
Figure 1
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
65
:
ED y
2
Moreover, the upper bound on the expected cost
Ly is given by
^
Ly
co y m co cu
q
s2 y m2 y m
:
2
There exists a distribution of D (the maximal dis^
tribution) for which Ly
is the actual expected cost
of the corresponding newsvendor model.
^
2. The function Ly
is strictly convex and is maximized at
(
p
o s
if CVo cu =co ;
m c2upc
c
c
o
u
y^
6
0
otherwise;
where CV 5 s/m is the coefficient of variation of D.
3. Let y be the optimal order-up-to level (under the actual
^ ^y , and this updistribution of D). Then Ly L
per bound above is tight for the maximal distribution.
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
66
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
otherwise:
cu m
8
>
100 1 p1n
>
>
<
q
C 100 1 CV co
ncu
>
>
>
:
0
p
if 0oCVo cu =co ;
p
p
if
cu =co CVo ncu =co ;
p
if
ncu =co CV:
The behavior of D and C with respect to s is depicted in Figures 3 and 4, respectively. Observe that
the general pattern is quite similar to the patterns seen
earlier for other distributions: the absolute savings
initially increase with s, followed by a period of decline and eventually reach 0, while the relative
savings are initially constant and then decline to 0.
However, unlike the previous section, the reasons for
(n n)cu
cu/co
ncu /co
(CVo cu =co ), both the centralized and the decentralized systems place non-zero orders. The inventory
costs grow with s for both systems, however, the rate
of growth is larger for the decentralized system by
1001 p1n%. Thus, for a fixed value of n, the absolute
savings are growing, while the relative savings are
constant.
Modep
2: Decentralized
system shutdown. For
p
CV 2 cu =co ; ncu =co , the decentralized system
stops ordering, accepting the maximal underage cost,
while the centralized system continues to place orders. Thus, the inventory cost of the centralized
system is increasing with s, while the inventory cost
of the decentralized system is constant, leading to the
decrease in the absolute and relative savings. Clearly,
this apparent decrease in the benefits of centralization
is due to the unfairness of the comparison: a functional system is compared with the stopped one. In
100 (1 1 / n )
cu /co
ncu /co
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
fact, centralization of inventory (and the resulting decrease in variability) is what allows the centralized
system to continue operating in this range.
3: Complete system shutdown. Once CV
pMode
ncu =co , the centralized system stops placing orders
as well, leading to a constant inventory cost equal to
the maximal underage cost (same as for the decentralized system). Thus, both the absolute and the
relative savings measures are 0 in this range.
We also observe that the behavior of D and C with
respect to the number of locations n for the distribution-free approach is quite similar to the one observed
for other distributions in the previous sections: for a
fixed s (or CV) and a (or cu), both the absolute and the
relative savings due to centralization generally increase with n, but a certain minimum number of
locations may have to be pooled before this increase
starts. Specifically,
1. If n CV2(co/cu), then D 5 C 5 0.
2. If n4CV2(co/cu), then both D and C are positive
and increasing in n. Note that limn!1 C 100%.
Of course, the reason for this behavior is that n has
to be large enough (in relation to CV) to enable the
centralized system to operate. When CV is sufficiently
small so that the decentralized system is operating,
the increase in D and C starts at n 5 2.
To summarize, we see that, at least in the case of the
maximal distribution, the seemingly counter-intuitive behavior of the absolute and the relative savings
measures is easily explained by understanding the
underlying workings of the decentralized and the
centralized systems. In the following section, we will
see that similar (albeit modified) effects hold in the
case of other distributions as well.
We close the current section by pointing out that the
distribution-free approach can be used to obtain lower
bounds on the absolute and relative savings for the
cases where the distribution of demand at each location is known but the distribution of the centralized
demand cannot be derived. The following proposition
follows directly from Theorem 1, Equation (8), and the
definitions of D and C.
PROPOSITION 2. Let Ly be the optimal cost of the newsvendor model with per-period p
demand D and the coefficient
p
p
^
of variation CV. Let L
ns co cu if CVo ncu =co
T
^ ncu m otherwise. Define
and L
T
^ nLy L
^ ;
D
T
"
^
C 100 1
#
^
L
T
:
nLy
^ and C C.
^
Then, D D
The previous result can, for example, be applied to
all distributions listed in Table 1 for which Ly is
available in closed form.
67
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
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Figure 5
Optimal Costs (Overage Cost in Black and Underage Cost in Grey) and Pooling Savings as Functions of r
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
occurs exactly during the period when the decentralized system has already entered into the effective
shutdown regime, while the centralized system is still
operational. Once both systems are in the effective
shutdown regime, D declines rapidly to 0. The relative
savings measure C appears to be even more sensitive
to this effect: while C is fairly flat when both systems
are operational, it begins to decline rapidly with s as
soon as the decentralized system enters the effective
shutdown regime.
The observed pattern with respect to the number of
locations n for a given level of s is similarly explained.
When the coefficient of variation of demand CV is
sufficiently high to place the decentralized system
into the effective shutdown regime, a certain level
of n may be required before the coefficient of variation
of the centralized system CVT is low enough to ensure
that the system is operational. Once this level is
reached, both D and C increase with n as further decreases in CVT give more and more advantage to the
centralized system.
To summarize, the newsvendor system for Category II distributions analyzed in this paper (and likely
for many other distributions as well) goes through the
following three regimes as s increases:
Regime 1: Normal operation. At low levels of variability, both the optimal overage and the optimal
underage costs increase with variability; we call this
the normal operation regime.
Regime 2: Effective shutdown. Above a certain level of
the coefficient of variation, the optimal overage cost
begins to decrease while the optimal underage cost
continues to increase with variability; we call this the
effective shutdown regime.
Regime 3: Complete shutdown. At still higher levels of
variability, the optimal order-up-to level as well as the
optimal overage cost are essentially equal to 0; we call
this the complete shutdown regime.
An intuitive explanation of the complete shutdown
regime is as follows. When the variance is excessively
large and the mean is fixed, for any y40, there is a
high probability that the demand is much smaller
than y and the overage cost is wasted. On the other
hand, for any y40, there is a high chance of having
demand much larger than y, so the underage is still
very large. Hence, by ordering nothing, we at least
save on the overage cost, i.e., y must be 0.
While both the decentralized and the centralized
systems go through the above three regimes as the
variability is increased, the decentralized system enters them at lower levels of demand variability. Hence,
when comparing the decentralized and centralized
systems, we observe five modes as follows:
Mode 1: Both systems operational. As long as the demand variability does not exceed a certain threshold,
the optimal overage cost increases with s for both the
69
decentralized and the centralized systems. The absolute savings D is growing while the relative savings C
is fairly constant in this range.
Mode 2: Effective shutdown of the decentralized system.
The decentralized system enters the effective shutdown regime: the optimal overage cost (as well as the
optimal order-up-to level y ) is decreasing as s grows.
The centralized system is still in normal operation (the
optimal overage cost is growing with s). The absolute
savings D peaks in this range while the relative
savings C begins to decline.
Mode 3: Both systems in the effective shutdown regime.
The centralized system also enters the effective shutdown regime. The optimal overage cost is decreasing
as s grows for both systems. Both D and C are
decreasing.
Mode 4: Complete shutdown of the decentralized system.
The decentralized system enters the complete shutdown regime: the optimal overage cost (as well as y )
is near 0 for the decentralized system. The centralized
system is still in the effective shutdown regime (the
optimal overage cost is decreasing as s grows). Both D
and C are approaching 0.
Mode 5: Complete system shutdown. The centralized
system also enters the complete shutdown regime.
The optimal overage cost is near 0 for both systems.
No orders are being placedfull underage cost is
booked. In this range, D 5 C 5 0.
The managerial takeaway from this analysis is even
simpler: since, in practice, a system should not be
operated in the effective shutdown regime, the centralization is always increasingly beneficial in the
relevant operating range. Once the absolute savings of
centralization begin to decline, it is a signal that the
variability is too large for the system (at least for the
decentralized configuration)centralization across a
number of locations is required for the system to
operate effectively.
A harder question to answer is: how would one
recognize the on-set of the effective shutdown regime
in practice, when the form of the distribution of D
may not be known? Here, the distribution-free system
appears to be of use: the CV thresholds for the shutdown of the decentralized and centralized
distribution-free systems appear to be good approximations for the on-set of the effective shutdowns in
the corresponding systems operating under various
Category II distributionssee Table 4. For example, if
the demand distribution is Lognormal and a 5 0.15,
the decentralized system enters the effective shutdown regime at CV 5 0.55 and the centralized system
enters the effective shutdown regime when
0.70oCV 0.90. Note that the distribution of the
centralized demand for the Lognormal and Weibull
distributions can only be computed numerically;
therefore, we are only able to compute a range for
Berman, Krass, and Tajbakhsh: On the Benefits of Risk Pooling in Inventory Management
70
Table 4
Production and Operations Management 20(1), pp. 5771, r 2010 Production and Operations Management Society
0.35
0.55
0.75
0.95
Lognormal
Demand distribution
0.55/(0.70, 0.90]
0.76/(1.00, 1.20]
1.02/(1.40, 1.60]
1.53/(2.20, 2.30]
4.54/(5.90, 6.10]
Gamma
0.55/0.78
0.75/1.07
1.01/1.43
1.48/2.09
3.54/5.01
Weibull
0.43/(0.60, 0.80]
0.63/(0.80, 1.00]
0.88/(1.20, 1.40]
1.32/(1.90, 2.10]
3.44/(4.80, 5.00]
Distribution-free
0.42/0.59
0.73/1.04
1.11/1.56
1.73/2.45
4.36/6.16
6. Concluding Remarks
We consider risk pooling in a multi-location newsvendor problem and investigate the sensitivity of the
inventory pooling benefits to the standard deviation
of demands at each location and the number of locations. We show that as long as the coefficient of
variation of the demands is small (less than approximately 0.5), the behavior of savings due to pooling is
well approximated by the Normal distributionthe
absolute savings increases with the standard deviation of demand and the relative savings remains fairly
constant. The growth in the absolute savings continues as long as both the decentralized and the
centralized systems are in the normal operation regime characterized by the increase in both overage
and underage costs with the standard deviation of
demand. As the standard deviations of demand at
each location continue to grow, first the decentralized
and then the centralized systems enter the effective
shutdown regime where the benefits of risk pooling
decrease; the pooling benefits vanish as both systems
enter the complete shutdown regime. Overall, our
results indicate that pooling is beneficial in the normal operating range of the system.
Many problems remain open in this line of research.
First, a great deal of our analysis is based on Monte
Carlo simulations due to the inability to analyze the
behavior of the centralized system analytically under
Category II distributions. Theoretical analysis substantiating the three regimes described above would
be very valuable. Second, it is intuitively clear that our
results do not apply to all demand distributions
only to those for which the order-up-to level approaches 0 as the standard deviation of demand
grows. The behavior under other positive distributions (i.e., the ones with positive support) that do not
satisfy the above condition remains to be analyzed.
Finally, we note that the lower bound on the benefits of pooling obtained via the distribution-free
approach in section 4 appears to be pretty weak. Obtaining better bounds and/or approximations on the
absolute and relative savings of inventory pooling
would be of theoretical and practical interest.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by NSERC grants of the
first two authors. The authors would like to thank the senior
editor and the two referees for their valuable comments.
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Supporting Information
Additional supporting information may be found in the
Online Supplement of this article:
Appendix S1. Online Supplement.
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