Optimal pricing, production, and sales policies for new product under supply constraint

This paper considers a firm that sells a durable product with a given market potential. The purpose of the firm is to maximize its profit by determining how much capacity to install before the sales horizon, how many products to produce in accordance with the capacity, and how many products to sell by pricing. Appealing to Pontryagin maximum principle in control theory, the authors obtain the closed-forms of all optimal decisions the firm should make. Furthermore, the optimal production rate and optimal sales rate are both equal to the demand rate, which is caused by the optimal pricing policy during the whole horizon, and the optimal pricing path is increasing with the cost of installing a unit of capacity. Furthermore, numerical analysis reveals the visual impression of the relationship of the parameters.