THE OPTIMAL PRODUCTION AND SALES POLICY FOR A NEW PRODUCT WITH NEGATIVE WORD-OF-MOUTH

In this paper, we consider a firm which maximizes its profit by determining the production and sales policies for a new product during the life-time of the product. Because of capacity constraint, we extend Bass demand process a more general case including the negative effectiveness of word-of-mouth. We analyze the production and sales policies in two cases: strong negative word-of-mouth and weak negative word-of-mouth. In the case of strong negative word-of-mouth, we show that myopic policy is optimal under some mild conditions. In the case of weak negative word-of-mouth, we show that build-up policy is optimal in a special case of negligible holding cost and discount rate. However, for positive holding cost and discount rate, we compare myopic policy with build-up policy by numerical examples, and show that the build-up policy is no longer a robust approximation to the optimal policy.