Risk Management Policies for Dynamic Capacity Control

Consider a dynamic decision making model under risk with a fixed planning horizon, namely the dynamic capacity control model. The model describes a firm, operating in a monopolistic setting and selling a range of products consuming a single resource. Demand for each product is time-dependent and modeled by a random variable. The firm controls the revenue stream by allowing or denying customer requests for product classes. We investigate risk-sensitive policies in this setting, for which risk concerns are important for many non-repetitive events and short-time considerations. Analyzing several numerically risk-averse capacity control policies in terms of standard deviation and conditional-value-at-risk, our results show that only a slight modification of the risk-neutral solution is needed to apply a risk-averse policy. In particular, risk-averse policies which decision rules are functions depending only on the marginal values of the risk-neutral policy perform well. The risk sensitivity of a policy only depends on the current state but it does not matter whether risk-neutral or risk-averse decisions led to the state. From a practical perspective, the advantage is that a decision maker does not need to compute any risk-averse dynamic program. Risk sensitivity can be easily achieved by implementing risk-averse functional decision rules based on a risk-neutral solution.