Generally, profit predictions are made conditional upon a particular functional form. The typical caveat offered is that this is not the “true” demand model, but is instead some reasonable approximation. We show how the notion of an approximation can be explicitly represented using a random...

Purpose – Retail buyers' decisions result in billions of dollars of merchandise being purchased and offered for sale by retailers around the world. At present, retail buyers do not appear to be adequately harnessing consumer input to improve their forecasts. The purpose of this paper is to...