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A common inventory management problem occurs when the product in question has limited shelf life (e.g., newspapers, produce, computer hardware). There is a cost of over ordering, because the product will shortly become obsolete and worthless. There is also an opportunity cost of under ordering associated with forgone sales. Under such a situation, the question of how much product to order to maximize expected profit is classically referred to as the newsboy problem. In this example, we assume demand has a Poisson distribution. However, this is not mandatory. Refer to any operations research textbook for a derivation of the formulas involved.