In the producer-seller relationship, the seller, besides his role of selling, is often in an ideal position to gather useful market information for the producer’s operations planning. Incentive alignment is critical to motivate both information-acquisition and sales efforts. Two popular contract forms are investigated. One is the forecast-based contract that requires the seller to submit a dema...

Given sales forecasts for a set of items along with the standard deviation associated with each forecast, we propose a new method of combining forecasts using the concepts of clustering. Clusters of items are identified based on similarity in their sales forecasts and then a common forecast (or combined forecast) is computed for each cluster of items. The objective of clustering is to minimize ...

The main objective of the paper is to develop an econometric model to forecast box-office revenue of motion pictures. Considering the importance demand for new products, marketing researches have developed various demand forecasting models. However, these models forecast future demands based on either several months of initial sales data after new product introduction or the survey data on cust...

We evaluate the performance of an information aggregation mechanism (IAM) implemented inside Intel to forecast unit sales for the company. Developed, refined and tested in the laboratory using experimental methods, the IAM is designed specifically to aggregate information. Its implementation at Intel allows us to test its performance in a much more complex field environment. The IAM provides no...

We describe a modeling exercise, conducted in conjunction with the online music retailer CDNOW, where the goal was to develop a simple stochastic model of buyer behavior capable of generating a medium-term forecast of aggregate CD purchasing by a cohort of new customers. Weekly sales are modeled using a finite mixture of beta-geometric distributions with a separate time-varying component to cap...

BACKGROUND Water utilities continue to be interested in implementing syndromic surveillance for the enhanced detection of waterborne disease outbreaks. The authors evaluated the ability of sales of over-the-counter diarrheal remedies available from the National Retail Data Monitor to predict endemic and epidemic gastrointestinal disease in the San Francisco Bay Area. METHODS Time series model...

A number of previous studies have shown that a combination of forecasts typically outperforms any component forecast. Service managers may wish to use forecast combination to improve forecast accuracy in predicting retail sales. In this study, revenue data from an actual service company is used to generate and test a least absolute value (LAV) regression model for forecast combination. The LAV ...

Data quality affects decision quality. In any forecasting and estimation model, the quality of the forecast data or the estimated data needs to be evaluated before using for decision-making. In two-level supply chain model, the retailer collects the sales information and use it to forecast the future demands over the lead-time, and the manufacturer collects the information about retailer's orde...

A given overall aggregate sales history could be the realization of very different purchasing scenarios. For example, a low sales level for a new product could be the result of: (i) many consumers making a trial purchase but very few of them making a repeat purchase (because the product does not meet their expectations), or (ii) a low trial rate but a high level of repeat purchasing amongst the...