Strategic Assortment Reduction by a Dominant Retailer

Technical Appendix Strategic Assortment Reduction by a Dominant Retailer

The Impact of Retailers’ Asymmetric Power on Channel Relations

A small number of retailers are determining more and more how consumer products are made and sold in the US. As widely reported in the trade press, these dominant retailers are dictating their terms to the manufacturers while other retailers do not enjoy the same leverage. In this study, we make the distinction between a dominant and a weak retailer, and investigate the dominant retailer/manufa...

Understanding Retail Assortments In Competitive Markets

Assortment planning, where a retailer decides which products to place on their store shelves, is one of the most fundamental decisions in retailing. Retail assortments are important drivers in consumers’ shopping decisions. With the ever increasing number of products available to retailers, category managers face a complex decision to select the “right” assortment for their categories. These as...

Retail Supply Chain Management Early Titles in the INTERNATIONAL SERIES INOPERATIONSRESEARCH& MANAGEMENT SCIENCE

We propose a model for the rationalization of retail assortment andstocking decisions for retail category management. We assume that consumers are heterogeneous in their intrinsic preferences for items and are willing tosubstitute less preferred items to a limited extent if their preferred items arenot available. We propose that the appropriate objective function for a farsighted re...

When to Carry Eccentric Products? Optimal Retail Assortment under Consumer Returns

To understand whether retailers should consider consumer returns when merchandising, we study how the optimal assortment of a price-taking retailer is influenced by its return policy. The retailer selects its assortment from an exogenous set of horizontally differentiated products. Consumers make purchase and keep/return decisions in nested multinomial logit fashion. Our main finding is that th...