There has been strong empirical evidence that demand variability increases as one moves up the supply chain (from the retailer to the raw materials supplier), a phenomenon called bullwhip effect. This paper examines the bullwhip effect and in particular one of its main causes, demand...

We use IoT-generated data on the real-time location of about 15 thousand displays in about 5 thousand stores of a Fortune 500 retailer, paired with the stores' POS data between September 2017 and March 2018, to measure the operational execution and effectiveness of promotional inventory display...

We use the adoption of electronic shelf labels (ESLs) by an international grocery retailer in 2015 to identify the effects of physical menu costs (i.e., labor and material costs of price adjustment) on retail performance. We find that the installation of ESLs increased gross margins...

We study a model in which a monopoly firm designs the quality profile of its inventory and then dynamically updates its pricing menu for a finite selling horizon to maximize revenue. In a counterfactual scenario, a social planner goes through the same process to maximize total welfare. We show...

We study the effects of the introduction of cross-channel functionalities on the overall sales dispersion of retailers and the implications of these effects for inventory management. To do that, we analyze data from a leading U.S. retailer who introduced a “ship-to-store” (STS) functionality...

We argue that dynamic pricing motivated by the management of inventory holding and ordering costs leads to increased operational efficiencies which could benefit firms without hurting consumers. To demonstrate this point, we equip the traditional economic order quantity (EOQ) setting with a rich...

We propose a simple explanation for price rigidity in perishable groceries: inventory record inaccuracy (IRI). We build our argument in two steps. First, we tailor Gallego and Van Ryzin’s (1994) revenue management model to perishable groceries by adding an inventory waste process,...

We build a structural econometric model of pricing substitutes with menu costs and apply it to quasi-experimental data to estimate the share of physical menu costs (material and labor costs of price adjustment) in total menu costs. The data comes from the adoption of electronic shelf labels...