Sebastian de la Fuente is the sixth largest supermarket chain in the Basque region of Spain. It has a novel dataset of 108,605 observations on 3,745 SKUs, collected for almost 2 1/2 years. I find the bullwhip effect in the data: at least 80% of the SKUs have a bigger variance in supplies than...

We ask if corporate executives have fixed effects (quirks) that explain perational decisions made in firms, independent of firm effects. We replicate the approach in Bertrand et al. (2003), solving the empirical challenge of distinguishing firm and executive effects by constructing a dataset of...

Business Process Reengineering is a common topic in the field of Manufacturing and Production Engineering. There are few efforts in the area of Service industry using this framework. The present study is an effort to use the framework for improving efficiency in an Institute of Excellence in...

How does the stock market affect inventory decisions? The efficient markets view is that low stock price means poor fundamentals, a higher cost of capital, and lower inventory. Normatively, firms should obtain their cost of capital from an efficient markets model of stock prices. My study is...

About inventory models, a concern is 'often made [that] any resemblances between the models constructed and reality are purely coincidental.' One set of factors not usually considered in textbook models of inventory decisions is suggested by well-documented evidence in macroeconomics, that the...

Among practitioners, inventory is often thought to be the root of all evil in operations management. The stock market hates it, the media abhors it, and managers have come to fear it. But high inventory levels can also be the result of strategic buying and high-availability strategies. The...