AspenWear, a retailer of ski wear needs to place an order for the Mirabelle, a designer ski jacket for the high-end market. The jacket retails for $600 and costs AspenWear $250 from a source in China. Due to fickle customer tastes, any surplus jackets at the end of the ski season cannot be carried over to the next season but must be disposed of. A bargain discounter has offered to buy these jackets at $150 each (and plans to mark them up to $300). Also, because of the long lead times involved in sourcing from China, there is realistically only one opportunity to place an order during each season (in November of each year so that the jackets will be ready by the following August). From past history, AspenWear believes that demand for the Mirabelle can be represented by a normal distribution with mean 6000 and standard deviation 3600. Their current ordering rule is as follows: Order Quantity = Mean Demand + (1/3)*(Standard Deviation)
a. Compute the order quantity that will maximize AspenWear's expected profit.
b. Compare the two quantities (the one computed above plus the current rule) in terms of the following performance measures: expected sales, expected profit, expected overstock, and fill rate.