Retailers face a challenging trade-off in maintaining versus restricting long-established lenient return policies. On one hand, lenient return policies have become an important part of retailers' value proposition and play a significant role in stimulating consumer purchases. On the other hand,...

Lean retailing philosophy appears to be manifested in retail industry patterns showing decreasing and historically low retailer inventories. Whether these lean inventory developments translate to better retailer operational performance is still an open question. We empirically examine...