Online retail reduces the costs of obtaining information about a product’s price and availability and of flexibly timing a purchase. Consequently, consumers can strategically time their purchases, weighing the costs of monitoring and the risk of inventory depletion against prospectively lower prices. At the same time, firms can observe and exploit their customers’ monitoring behavior. Using a d...

Farm milk prices tend to be volatile. Dairy farmers, industry pundits, and policymakers further tend to react to price volatility with alarm. One point of concern is the response of retail prices. This study investigates farm-to-retail price transmission in the 2000s for whole milk and cheddar cheese. Results show that price shocks at the farm gate are transmitted with delay and asymmetry to re...

We investigate advertising level, pricing and production decision problems in a supply chain when demand and cost disruptions occur simultaneously. The channel consists of one manufacturer and one retailer where demand depends on retail price and advertisement expenditure. We examine the case in both cooperative game and non-cooperative Stackelberg game.

Motivated by the popularity of Value-at-Risk (VaR) objective in finance, this chapter reviews and studies its application in fashion retail operations management. First, a formal optimization model is reviewed in which the fashion retailer aims at optimizing a VaR objective with both pricing and inventory decisions. Second, the detailed solution schemes are explored. Third, numerical examples a...

perc.tamu.edu 1 any states have opened retail electricity markets to competition so that households can choose their electricity provider. As a result, consumers have the ability to choose their retail provider at unregulated prices, creating new markets where entrant retailers procure wholesale energy and market that energy to consumers. Across the world, the retail electricity sector is being...

The multinational retailer IKEA represents a natural laboratory for studying international pricing and product cycle behavior. With 314 stores in 38 countries, IKEA is a major international presence in retail housewares and furnishings. IKEA is unique among homegoods retailers in its publication of annual catalog of prices guaranteed to hold for 1 year. This paper examines international pricing...

A ban on pricing below cost was implemented under the 1987 Groceries Order based on the premise that loss leading used in multi-product retail pricing distorts competition and exploits consumers in the short run, while driving a more concentrated structure and reducing welfare in the long run. Loss leading is examined for multi-product retailers selling in imperfectly competitive market niches ...

Consumers are increasingly navigating across sales channels to maximize the value of their purchase. The existing retail practices of pricing channels independently at the one end, and matching channel and competitor prices at the other, are unable to achieve the desired profitable coordination required between channels. As part of a joint partnership agreement with IBM Commerce, we engaged wit...

This paper examines how consolidation in the marketing system affects prices for orange juice. We isolated the pricing behavior of brand marketers, wholesalers, and retailers by observing the retail prices for specific orange juice products, including leading national brands and private label brands, in 54 U.S. markets over a 1-year period. The data provided little compelling evidence that cons...

T study extends the single-period vertical price interaction in a manufacturer–retailer dyad to a multiperiod setting. A manufacturer distributes a durable product through an exclusive retailer to an exhaustible population of consumers with heterogeneous reservation prices. In each period, the manufacturer and retailer in turn set wholesale and retail prices, respectively, and customers with va...