Radio frequency identification (RFID)-enabled smart shelves have recently attracted enormous attention from both industry and academia. Retailers have an explosion of interest in deploying smart shelves for the automatic ordering and the reduction of inventory inaccuracy. This study explores the retailers’ optimal policy for investing in a smart shelf inventory control system. Since the decisio...

Intense competition among online retailers and high customer expectations drive product returns, which eat into online retailers’ profits. Thus, online retailers need to find ways to reduce return rates without causing a concomitant decrease in sales. Using a grounded theory approach which combines literature-based insights and in-depth qualitative interviews with managers from major online ret...

With the development of the computer technology, many retailers sale the products not only in the entity shop, but also in the online shop. The network channel brings a lot of convenience. However, it also produces the channel conflict. In the dual channel supply chain, the retailers are in a passive position. Therefore, they begin to use the optimal dynamical pricing strategy to determine the ...

In this paper, we study the pricing problem in a fuzzy supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and two competitive retailers. There is a single product produced by a manufacturer and then sold by two competitive retailers to the consumers. The manufacturer acting as a leader determines the wholesale price, and the retailers acting as the followers set their sale prices independently. Both ...

It has become a common commercial phenomenon for retailers to establish their own brands. The manufacturer referral strategy is studied through model which includes manufacturer, traditional retailer and store brand retailer. We conduct research on the three cooperation methods of manufacturer: “no information referral”, “exclusive referral” “nonexclusive referral”. equilibrium wholesale price,...

We consider a two-echelon distribution system in which a supplier distributes a product to N competing retailers. The demand rate of each retailer depends on all of the retailers’ prices, or alternatively, the price each retailer can charge for its product depends on the sales volumes targeted by all of the retailers. The supplier replenishes his inventory through orders (purchases, production ...

In a distribution system, the distribution center (DC) observes order streams from all retailers it serves while each individual retailer may only have the local demand information available. This paper investigates how the DC can exploit this informational advantage over the retailers to improve its own performance as well as the performance of the entire supply chain. Specifically, we study a...

Acknowledgments: This project was undertaken when Xiaolin Xing was visiting University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University in 2000. Xiaolin Xing is grateful to the two universities for using their resources and facilities. We thank the seminar participants in Nanyang Technological University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong for comments. We also thank two anonymous referees for helpful ...

a r t i c l e i n f o Context: Price discounts are common retail promotional tools that are defined by their size and duration. Consumers possess a general schema in which they believe that retailers are motivated to associate larger price discounts with shorter durations and smaller price discounts with longer durations. However, factors influencing promotion management frequently lead retaile...

This paper is based on observations that competing retailers have the option of either agreeing in advance to transship excess inventory to each other or seeing unsatisfied customers switch to the competitor for a substitute. A transshipment game and a substitution game between competing retailers is studied. After establishing the existence and uniqueness of a pure-strategy Nash Equilibrium in...