We analyze the listing decisions of a retailer who may ask her suppliers to make upfront payments in order to be listed. We consider a sequential game with upfront payments being negotiated before short-term delivery contracts. We show that the retailer is more likely to use upfront payments the...

Analyzing a sequential bargaining framework with one retailer and two suppliers of substitutable goods, we show that slotting fees may emerge as a result of a rent-shifting mechanism when consumer shopping costs are taken into account. If consumers economize on their shopping costs by bundling...

We develop a structural demand model that endogenously captures the effect of out-of-stocks on customer choice by simulating a time-varying set of available alternatives. Our estimation method uses store-level data on sales and partial information on product availability. Our model allows for...

To understand whether retailers should consider consumer returns when merchandising, we study how the optimal assortment of a price-taking retailer is influenced by its return policy. The retailer selects its assortment from an exogenous set of horizontally differentiated products. Consumers...

Managing product variety has long been a concern for firms from many different industries, with less product variety typically associated with higher operational performance. However, most contemporary research on product variety has looked at its impacts on the operations and sales performance...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of store adjustments in product variety that considers multiproduct service technology to evaluate the impact of entry regulations on variety and long-run profits in Swedish retail. Using rich data on stores and product categories, we find that more liberal...

We empirically examine consumer showrooming phenomenon in the footwear industry. Using transaction-level data from a large online footwear retailer and offline store entry data from four major footwear retail chains in the U.S., we quantify the effect of offline store entry on the competing...