Managing Sales Forecasters

Managing visits from pharmaceutical sales representatives.

Vol. 37 No. 5 • May 2012 • P&T® 261 mivacurium following a sales visit by a pharmaceutical representative. The carton of mivacurium was delivered to the pharmacy and was placed in stock next to metronidazole. Both products were packaged in foil overwraps. Before the error occurred, metronidazole had been the only foil-wrapped, premixed solution in the pharmacy; miva curium was not on the formul...

Testing Multiple Forecasters∗

We consider a cross-calibration test of predictions by multiple potential experts in a stochastic environment. This test checks whether each expert is calibrated conditional on the predictions made by other experts. We show that this test is good in the sense that a true expert—one informed of the true distribution of the process—is guaranteed to pass the test no matter what the other potential...

Forecasters ’ Objectives and Strategies ∗

This chapter develops a unified modeling framework for analyzing the strategic behavior of forecasters. The theoretical model encompasses reputational objectives, competition for the best accuracy, and bias. Also drawing from the extensive literature on analysts, we review the empirical evidence on strategic forecasting and illustrate how our model can be structurally estimated.

Managing Customer Services: Human Resource Practices, Turnover, And Sales Growth

Managing Perishable Inventories in Retailing: Replenishment, Clearance Sales, and Segregation

We study joint replenishment and clearance sales of perishable goods under a general finite lifetime and a last-in-first-out (LIFO) issuing rule, a problem common in retailing. We show that the optimal policies can be characterized by two thresholds for each age group of inventory: a lower one and a higher one. For an age group of inventory with a remaining lifetime of two periods or longer, cl...