Abstract:In retail operations,retailers usually have limited access to market information before the start of the selling season. The inventory that ends up as unsold in primary markets can be significant.Thus,retailers look for strategies such as selling in the secondary markets at a discounted price.In this paper,we formulate a two-stage model for this problem and analyze the properties of the model under a more relaxed demand assumption.Finally,we derive optimality conditions for the retailers’ordering quantity decision and switching timing decision of seasonal goods.