Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2015 Time: 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm Venue: Salon Room 5, Marriott Northeast Hotel, Beijing Markdown pricing is a common technique used by many retailers to match supply with demand for time sensitive goods such as electronics and fashion products. If the seller does not reduce the price sufficiently, there may be excess inventory at the end of the life-cycle that has to be discarded or sold at a very low salvage value. On the other hand, if the price level is set too low, all the items may sell very quickly resulting in a reduction in possible revenue. So a balanced approach is very important in ensuring high revenue for the firm. When doing markdown pricing, large retail chains often times have to consider all the stores served by a central warehouse jointly in a coordinated fashion because they share inventory of the product to be marked down. There are often various business rules that have to be followed. In this talk, Dr. Zhi-Long Chen will present a joint inventory allocation and markdown pricing problem and an optimization based solution algorithm for solving the problem. At the same time derive a number of managerial insights about the impact of business rules and price sensitivity of individual stores on the total expected revenue and on the optimal inventory allocation and pricing decisions. Agenda ： 7:00-7:20 pm Registration 7:20-7:30pm Welcome Remarks by David Liu, Executive Director of China Office, University of Maryland’s Robert H.Smith School of Business 7:30- 8:15 pm Presentation “Inventory Allocation and Markdown Pricing across Multiple Stores” by Dr. Zhi-Long Chen 8:15-8:30pm Q&A Please click “Read More 阅读原文” at the bottom to RSVP if you are interested. About the Speaker: Zhi-Long Chen Professor of Operations Management, Robert H. Smith School of Business Dr. Chen received his PhD degree in Operations Research from Princeton University in 1997, and is currently a professor of operations management at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. Dr. Chen worked as an assistant professor of systems engineering at University of Pennsylvania from 1997 to 2001, prior to moving to the Smith School. His research interests cover supply chain scheduling, production and logistics operations, dynamic pricing, and optimization. He has published over 50 journal articles in these areas. Dr. Chen has conducted several NSF funded research projects on integrated production and distribution operations, and the coordination between dynamic pricing and scheduling. He is working closely with industry on several projects in the areas of supply chain optimization and dynamic pricing. He is currently serving as an associate editor of Operations Research, IIE Transactions, NRL, Networks, and Journal of Scheduling