A Game Theoretic Approach to Multi-Period Newsvendor Problems with Censored Markovian Demand

This paper studies the Newsvendor problem for a setting in which (i) the demand is temporally correlated, (ii) the demand is censored, (iii) the distribution of the demand is unknown. The correlation is modeled as a Markovian process. The censoring means that if the demand is larger than the action (selected inventory), only a lower bound on the demand can be revealed. The uncertainty set on the demand distribution is given by only the upper and lower bound on the amount of the change from a time to the next time. We propose a robust approach to minimize the worst-case total cost and model it as a min-max zero-sum repeated game. We prove that the worst-case distribution of the adversary at each time is a two-point distribution with non-zero probabilities at the extrema of the uncertainty set of the demand. And the optimal action of the decision-maker can have any of the following structures: (i) a randomized solution with a two-point distribution at the extrema, (ii) a deterministic solution at a convex combination of the extrema. Both above solutions balance over-utilization and under-utilization costs. Finally, we extend our results to uni-model cost functions and present numerical results to study the solution.