Seeing the Doughnut from the Whole: A Response to “Watching the Whole Doughnut”

In “Watching the Whole Doughnut,” the preceding paper, T. M. Whitin comments upon the methodology developed in my paper “Filling Out the Doughnuts: the Single Period Inventory Model in Corporate Pricing Policy [1980].” Basically, Whitin claims to solve for the optimal solution to the problem presented there, and then uses this solution to examine the additional effects of price changes on profitability. Unfortunately, the solution Whitin develops is clearly suboptimal from both a practical and theoretical standpoint.