The single-period (news-vendor) problem: Literature review and suggestions for future research

The single-period problem (SPP), also known as the newsboy or news-vendor problem, is to find the order quantity which maximizes the expected profit in a single period probabilistic demand framework. Interest in the SPP remains unabated and many extensions to it have been proposed in the last decade. These extensions include dealing with different objectives and utility functions, different supplier pricing policies, different news-vendor pricing policies and discounting structures, different states of information about demand, constrained multi-products, multiple-products with substitution, random yields, and multi-location models. This paper builds a taxonomy of the SPP literature and delineates the contribution of the different SPP extensions. This paper also suggests some future directions for research.