As the Internet develops into a robust channel for commerce, it will be important to understand the characteristics of electronic markets. Businesses, consumers, government regulators, and academic researchers face a variety of questions when analyzing these nascent markets. Will electronic...

Internet retailing models support supply chains where consumer order locations are decoupled from inventory locations. In this setting, retailers dynamically consider inventory location speculation and postponement to fulfill their orders. Particularly, retailers can manage inventory to fulfill...

Unlike traditional retailers, which use inventory speculation for all their merchandise, Internet book retailers selectively use inventory postponement for specific merchandise items to lower their inventory costs. We develop and test hypotheses that describe merchandise determinants of...

Matching supply, demand, and capacity is made more costly and less efficient when demand variation is amplified into work-in-process, or backlog, variation. Existing research has focused on managing variations in backlog quantity. This paper extends that research by examining how variation in...