Warehouse club (WC) retailers have typically expanded to new markets using stand-alone stores, rather than pursuing dense store networks as other (non-WC) retailers have in the past. While this strategy generates operating efficiencies, it also imposes high travel costs on households to shop,...

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...

Purpose - How should a firm decide which of four choices - i.e. inventory speculation, inventory postponement, inventory consignment, and reverse inventory consignment - is most appropriate to adopt for a given purchased item in a particular context? This paper seeks to identify and explain the...

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...

Unlike in a traditional store environment where inventory is directly visible to customers, Internet retailers can selectively choose how to divulge inventory level information to customers. For example, when viewing a particular item page, online shoppers may either see merely “in stock” or...

Given varied consumer perceptions of inventory information, online retailers' presentation of such information influences purchase behavior. We investigate an online retailer's optimal inventory disclosure policy assuming two distinct consumer segments: savvy (or, experienced) consumers, who can...

Product returns present one of the biggest operational challenges in the world of Internet retailing due to the sheer volume and cost of processing returns. But returns also represent an often-missed opportunity to manage customer relationships and build customer loyalty to the retailer. Based...