AbstractThe object of this article is to investigate the risk‐pooling effect of depot stock in two‐echelon distribution system in which the depot servesnretailers in parallel, and to develop computationally tractable optimization procedures for such systems. The depot manager has complete information about stock levels and there are two opportunities to allocate stock to the retailers within each order cycle. We identify first‐ and second‐order aspects to the risk‐pooling effect. In particular, the second‐order effect is the property that the minimum stock available to any retailer after the second allocation converges in probability to a constant as the number of retailers in the system increases, assuming independence of the demands. This property is exploited in the development of efficient procedures to determine near‐optimal values of the poli