Retailer's inventory policies for a one time only manufacturer trade deal of uncertain duration

This paper models a retailer's response to temporary manufacturer's trade deals characterized by a time interval of random length, but with the ending date known before its occurrence. Uncertainty is handled through a reordering point, which serves as a trigger mechanism for a new special order and is activated at the discount termination date. The model generates ordering policies, applicable to any probability distribution and is shown to yield well-known deterministic optimal policies as a limiting case.