Abstract: The outbreak of the new coronavirus causes the shortage of protective supplies, which increases the risk of infection of medical practitioners. In the epidemic situation, the market prices of the protective suppliers are distorted and cannot be applied. In this paper, we propose a mathematical programming model to guide the production, distribution and pricing mechanism of protective suppliers. Based on the model, we propose the notion of the generalized shadow price which can be used to price the protective suppliers, and further guide the manufactures to optimize their production. The advantage of the generalized shadow price over the traditional ones is that it reflects the cost for manufactures to enhance their production capacities. Furthermore, we build the relationship between the generalized shadow price and the set of Lagrange multipliers, and propose a linear programming model to compute the generalized shadow price. The numerical simulation tests show the practical value of generalized shadow prices in pricing the protective suppliers in the epidemic situation.

Key words: coronavirus, epidemic protection supplier, pricing, shadow price