Whitman hosts May 23 lecture on ordering and pricing perishable products

Amy Mehringer
315 443 3834

Nick Petruzzi, associate professor of business administration and academic director of M.B.A. programs at the University of Illinois, will speak at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University on Friday, May 23, on “The Newsvendor Model with Heterogeneous Consumers.” The lecture will take place at 1 p.m. in Room 525 of the Whitman School building. It is free and open to the public.

Petruzzi studies the problem of setting the price and order quantity of a perishable product (e.g., fashion apparel, high-tech products) when consumers are heterogeneous either in their valuations of the product, in their valuations of an outside option available to them, or in both valuations. He develops a taxonomical framework for classifying models that incorporate demand-management effects. The taxonomy yields a unified framework that includes both a model with price-dependent demand and a model with endogenous demand as special cases. In addition to making a conceptual contribution by developing and drawing insights from this taxonomy, he makes technical contributions by conditions under which the underlying optimization problems are well-behaved.

Petruzzi holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. in operations management from Purdue University. His research interests include pricing models in operations management, revenue management, the operations/marketing interface, and supply-chain coordination.

He currently is an associate editor for Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (M&SOM) and for Decision Sciences, and he has been published in the leading academic journals in his industry. He teaches courses in operations management, manufacturing planning and control, design and management of service systems, and project management.