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Author: Ismail Kirci
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bulk sales
Languages : en
Pages :
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This dissertation consists of two essays, each focusing on an important topic in retail operations. These topics are each summarized below. In the first essay, we investigate the optimal pricing and package size decisions of a retailer selling a perishable product either in packages or in bulk. Bulk sale is defined as selling the product in a container (instead of packages) that allows customers to buy as much or as many as they want. We analyze how adding a bulk sale option affects the optimal decisions, when it is optimal to offer the product in package/bulk and when it is optimal to offer both at the same time. We also investigate implications of the pricing and package size decisions as well as the bulk sale option on the food waste at the consumer level. According to our results, when the market is homogeneous, selling the product in packages instead of bulk gives twice more profit to the retailer but it also gives twice more relative waste. When the market is heterogeneous with two consumer segments, adding a bulk sale option could increase expected profit up to 12 percent and could decrease relative waste up to 8 percent. In the second essay, we work on the multi-period assortment problem for a retailer with variety-seeking/avoiding consumers. If consumers are variety-seeker, they are not likely to buy the same product in two subsequent periods. If customers are variety-avoidant, their probability of repeat purchase is high. We assume that each consumer‘s variety seeking/avoiding tendency is characterized by a parameter V ∈ [−1, 1]. In our analysis, we consider two different firm types which we call the Dynamic and the Static firms. The Dynamic firm optimizes the profit over the entire horizon by changing (if necessary) the assortment offered in each period dynamically, whereas the static firm has to decide one assortment to offer throughout the horizon. We provide some structural results for the finite and infinite horizon versions of the problem. We show that the existence of variety seeking/avoiding behavior decreases the retailer‘s profit. For the infinite horizon problem, we show that the static firm’s optimal assortment is a popular-eccentric set and for some cases repeating to cycle between two assortment yields more profit than offering the same in each period.
Author: Ismail Kirci
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bulk sales
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This dissertation consists of two essays, each focusing on an important topic in retail operations. These topics are each summarized below. In the first essay, we investigate the optimal pricing and package size decisions of a retailer selling a perishable product either in packages or in bulk. Bulk sale is defined as selling the product in a container (instead of packages) that allows customers to buy as much or as many as they want. We analyze how adding a bulk sale option affects the optimal decisions, when it is optimal to offer the product in package/bulk and when it is optimal to offer both at the same time. We also investigate implications of the pricing and package size decisions as well as the bulk sale option on the food waste at the consumer level. According to our results, when the market is homogeneous, selling the product in packages instead of bulk gives twice more profit to the retailer but it also gives twice more relative waste. When the market is heterogeneous with two consumer segments, adding a bulk sale option could increase expected profit up to 12 percent and could decrease relative waste up to 8 percent. In the second essay, we work on the multi-period assortment problem for a retailer with variety-seeking/avoiding consumers. If consumers are variety-seeker, they are not likely to buy the same product in two subsequent periods. If customers are variety-avoidant, their probability of repeat purchase is high. We assume that each consumer‘s variety seeking/avoiding tendency is characterized by a parameter V ∈ [−1, 1]. In our analysis, we consider two different firm types which we call the Dynamic and the Static firms. The Dynamic firm optimizes the profit over the entire horizon by changing (if necessary) the assortment offered in each period dynamically, whereas the static firm has to decide one assortment to offer throughout the horizon. We provide some structural results for the finite and infinite horizon versions of the problem. We show that the existence of variety seeking/avoiding behavior decreases the retailer‘s profit. For the infinite horizon problem, we show that the static firm’s optimal assortment is a popular-eccentric set and for some cases repeating to cycle between two assortment yields more profit than offering the same in each period.
Author: Hao-Chun Chuang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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This dissertation comprises three essays in which we develop optimization, econometric, and simulation models to help traditional retailers improve in-store operations. Our modeling efforts aim to tackle inventory record inaccuracy (IRI) and suboptimal staffing levels, both of which are pervasive problems in retailing and cause non-trivial profit loss. In the first essay, we devise two optimization models that represent current practices in industry to minimize costs induced by IRI: daily-fraction and all-or-none inspection. We further perform a case study to identify deficiencies of store operating practices given different risk preferences. Our findings provide practical guidelines for managers to design cost-efficient inspection policy. In the second essay, we develop a dynamic simulation model to analyze multiple antecedents of IRI. Based on simulation results, we derive two hypotheses on the association between IRI and labor. The panel data analysis shows that both the level and the mix of store labor have strong impacts on IRI. Our analysis derives qualitative insights for retail managers to prevent the occurrence of IRI. Finally, in the third essay, we perform an empirical study to improve staffing decisions in retailing. We first develop a response function to quantify the impact of labor and traffic on sales. Grounded on the function we propose a traffic-based staffing heuristic, which performs closely to the optimal and outperforms existing staffing levels in counterfactual experiments. A major contribution of our study is to quantify the benefits of delivering labor plans based on traffic information. Also, the staffing approach is easy to use and saves the need for traffic forecasting. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible from http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/149350
Author: Hyun Seok Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Tugce Vural
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Decision making spends valuable resources of a decision maker such as time, energy, and cognitive power. This dissertation focuses on the ripple effects of the customers' costly decision making process that a retailer should recognize in its operational decisions. In Chapter 2, a new choice model is presented to capture the customers' effort in their purchase decision. The optimal consideration set of customers, i.e., which options to collect information from, is characterized using a stylized model. We show that biases towards the options, stochastic payoffs, and the degree of difficulty in collecting and processing information are the primary determinants of the consideration set formation. By anticipating how customers make a choice, a retailer's optimal product assortment and price decision are provided. We further introduce the concept of fashion and show its influence both on the customers' and a retailer's decisions. Chapter 3 continues the discussion with the Home-Try-On retail model that intends to assist customers in finding what they value by sending a curated box of products to their homes. The retail model is analyzed by optimizing the assortment and price decisions to understand whether if it is optimal for a retailer to determine the box content for its customers. We show that it is not always profitable for a retailer to determine the box content. In some cases, the optimal decision maker of the box composition, i.e., customers or the retailer, can be the one who acquires and evaluates the information in a more costly manner. The chapter aims the attention on the retail operations that are not directly observable by customers, yet are affected by the costliness of purchase decisions. We specifically present the ways in which the inventory replenishment mechanism is shaped by helping customers in a Home-Try-On retail. Using insights from the interviews that we conducted with a Home-Try-On retailer, a unique version of a closed-loop supply chain is presented and simulated. The outputs of the simulation further point out the necessity of approaching the problems with a closed-loop supply chain lens due to the complexity of emerging operation models. These chapters suggest the importance of incorporating the value of customers' attention and new avenues that it opens in the Operations Management discipline.
Author: Nathan Charles Craig
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Retail trade
Languages : en
Pages : 101
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This dissertation presents research on two topics in retail operations management: the inventory-based lending cycle and the impact of supplier inventory service level on retailer demand. The first study examines the cycle of lending, appraisal, and liquidation that supports collateralized lending on retail inventories. The second study introduces the retail store liquidation problem to the literature, presents a model for improving pricing, inventory, and store closing decisions during liquidation, and discusses insights and results generated by applying the model to recent large-scale retail liquidations. The third study provides the first empirical evidence of the effect of supplier inventory service level on retailer demand, demonstrating a positive and substantial relationship between a supplier's historical inventory service level to a retailer and the retailer's current demand for the supplier's products.
Author: Vishal Gaur
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 125
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Author: Mustafa Serkan Akturk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Author: Matthias Schu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658182156
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 147
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Matthias Schu examines three main topics in his research: The intention of store-based retail and wholesale companies to open up an own online channel, factors determining the foreign market selection behavior of online retailers as well as factors affecting the speed in the internationalization process of online retailers. New insights for retail research and management are presented and contribute to existing knowledge; the study is valuable for academic researchers and for practitioners who are interested in a thorough analysis of online retailing from a strategic and theoretical perspective.
Author: Youran Fu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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This dissertation studies empirical operational problems in retail sales and service systems through three essays. We are in the middle of a remarkable rise in data analytics as available data, as well as the capability of artificial intelligence grows exponentially. This dissertation demonstrates how we can use traditional econometrics and cutting-edge machine learning models to provide data analytics for retail operations management. The first essay studies the value of unstructured social media text data in forecasting future fashion demands several months out, at a granular style-color level. Using recent advancement in natural language processing and machine learning techniques, we show that unstructured social media text data, after proper processing, has significant predictive in forecasting color demands, weeks or even months into the future. The predictive power measured by the improvement of the out-of-sample mean absolute deviation ranges from 18% to 25% over different manufacturing lead times and is robust across different geographic markets. Finally, we explore the mechanism and show that the predictive power comes from social media data capturing the fashion retail cycle, fashion influence theories, and marketing efforts. The second essay studies what factors and how they affect workforce productivity in service systems. Using a detailed time-stamped data, a novel framework, and a bivariate Probit model to contend econometric difficulties arising from workers' making endogenous discretionary decisions, we provide a complete picture on how different factors affect instantaneous productivity collectively while explicitly controlling for the endogenous discretionary decisions. We find that peer effects have a negative impact on productivity with workers' discretionary decisions serving as mediator. Scheduled interruptions and workers' decisions to multitasking also have negative impacts while decisions to take breaks and task-switching improve productivity by 54% and 25% respectively. The third essay proposes a novel methodology to contend a challenging task--optimizing long-term cumulative reward in a partially observed high-order Markov decision process. We combine machine learning and approximate dynamic programming techniques to develop a tandem neural network structure. The methodology is applied to a real-world customer relationship dataset and outperforms extant models in the field in terms of both the predictive power and optimization performance.
Author: Aravind Govindarajan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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