Recent press has highlighted the environmental benefits associated with online shopping, such as emissions savings from individual drivers, economies of scale in package delivery, and decreased inventories. We formulate a dual channel model for a retailer who has access to both online and...

Item demands at individual retail stores in a chain often differ significantly, due to local economic conditions, cultural and demographic differences and variations in store format. Accounting for these variations appropriately in inventory management can significantly improve retailers’...

Despite their implementations in a wide variety of applications, there are very few instances where every item sold at a retail store is RFID-tagged. While the business case for expensive items to be RFID tagged may be somewhat clear, we claim that even ‘cheap’ items (i.e., those that cost...

We investigate the value of accounting for demand seasonality in inventory control. Our problem is motivated by discussions with retailers who admitted to not taking perceived seasonality patterns into account in their replenishment systems. We consider a single-location, single-item periodic...

Sales forecasting at the UPC level is important for retailers to manage inventory. In this paper, we propose more effective methods to forecast retail UPC sales by incorporating competitive information including prices and promotions. The impact of these competitive marketing activities on the...

Retailers, from fashion stores to grocery stores, have to decide what range of products to offer, i.e., their product assortment. Frequent introduction of new products, a recent business trend, makes predicting demand more difficult, which in turn complicates assortment planning. We propose and...

In many supply chains, the manufacturer sells not only through an independent retailer, but also through its own direct channel. This work studies the pricing and assortment decisions in such a supply chain in the presence of inventory costs. In our model, the retailer offers a subset of the...