Manufacturer's pricing and lot-sizing decisions for perishable goods under various payment terms by a discounted cash flow analysis

In practice, a cash payment is a classical payment term, a credit payment is commonly applied to stimulate sales, and an advance payment is used to avoid order cancellations. A combination of these three payment types is considered an advance-cash-credit (ACC) payment scheme, which is commonly used in business transactions. For instance, a home buyer must pay a homeowner 1% of the listing price as a good-faith deposit (i.e., an advance payment) to start negotiating the price, then pay 10% of the agreed-upon price (i.e., a cash payment) when signing the contract, and then has a delay before the final payment (i.e., a credit payment, a mortgage) is approved. In this paper, we develop an economic production quantity (EPQ) model for perishable goods in a three-echelon supplier-manufacturer-customer chain: (1) demand rate depends on selling price and freshness of a perishable item (i.e., time to sell-by date), and (2) the supplier offers an upstream ACC payment to the manufacturer, while the manufacturer grants a downstream cash-credit payment to customers. Consequently, the manufacturer must determine optimal selling price, production run time, and replenishment cycle time to maximize the present value of total annual profit by using a discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis. The proposed model fits in a general framework that includes numerous previous models as special cases. The numerical results reveal that the present value of total profit is joint concave in both selling price and cycle time. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed and managerial insights are also provided.