Problem Definition. Firms that sell products over a limited selling season often have only imperfect information about (a) the exact timing of that season, (b) the demand volume to expect, and (c) the temporal distribution of demand over the selling season. Given these uncertainties, firms must...

We consider the basic problem of refi tting a time series over a finite period of time and formulate it as a stochastic dynamic program. By changing the underlying Markov decision process we are able to obtain a model that at optimality considers historical data as well as forecasts of future...