To influence demand, some online retailers post messages (e.g., “5 units or less left in stock”) on their product pages to signal impending stockouts. These “scarcity” messages provide consumers “partial” inventory information, revealing only an upper bound on the number of units...

This paper undertakes two related tasks to augment current understanding regarding vendor-owned inventory management (VOIM) arrangements implemented in the retail industry. The first task formally juxtaposes three prevalent forms of VOIM arrangements (i.e., Consignment, Pay-On-Scan, and...

Several prominent Internet retailers provide real-time inventory-level information to online shoppers. Whereas this practice hints at retailers' belief that disclosed inventory information may induce demand, prior research in operations management and marketing have yielded conflicting views on...