On The Effectiveness Of The Negative Binomial Approximation In A Multi-Echelon Inventory Model: A Mathematical Analysis

Graves (1996) developed a multi-echelon inventory model and used a negative binomial distribution to approximate the distribution of a random variable in the model. Two earlier multi-echelon inventory studies (Graves, 1985; Lee and Moinzadeh, 1987) have similarly used negative binomial approximations. Only computational evidence has been offered in support of the approximations. We provide, for the latest model (Graves, 1996), a mathematical analysis of the effectiveness of such an approximation.