The paper „Inventory timing: How to serve a stochastic season“ written by Jochen Schlapp, Moritz Fleischmann, and Danja Sonntag investigates inventory management for seasonal items facing an uncertain timing of the season. It shows how to counter the uncertainty through an appropriate timing of inventory availability. A key insight is that naïve decision rules (“earlier is better”) may reduce not only a firm's profits but also its capacity to serve customer demand.
The paper is available with open access in Production and Operations Management.