We study stochastic inventory planning with lost sales, where contrary to classical inventory theory, the knowledge of the demand distribution is not available a priori. While the manager observes the sales quantities in each period, lost sales are unobservable, i.e., demand data is censored. The decision in each period depends only on historical sales data. Excess inventory is either perishabl...

We consider a repeated newsvendor problem where the decision-maker (DM) does not have access to the underlying distribution of discrete demand. We analyze three informational settings: i.) the DM observes realized demand in each period; ii.) the DM only observes realized sales ; and iii.) the DM observes realized sales but also a lost sales indicator that records whether demand was censored or ...

We study stochastic inventory planning with lost sales and instantaneous replenishment, where contrary to the classical inventory theory, the knowledge of the demand distribution is not available. Furthermore, we observe only the sales quantity in each period, and lost sales are unobservable, that is, demand data are censored. The manager must make an ordering decision in each period based only...

The advent of the World-Wide Web in 1992 eventually led to the advent of electronic commerce. eCommerce has led to the decline in sales tax revenues for various collection agencies across the U.S. The federal government has issued, and renewed, a moratorium on Internet taxes, and thus state and local governments are restricted from collecting sales tax from Internet sales. Coupled with a demise...

This paper studies whether trading in social networks allocates a new technology efficiently. I use a field experiment in Odisha India to compare decentralized trade of a new technology through networks with an approach where demand was revealed via door-to-door sales. While 84% of farmers are expected to gain from the technology, only 7% adopt in networks. Conversely, 40% of farmers adopt when...

Once a new product is available, if the company starts the sales without building an initial inventory (myopic policy), the demand for the product grows rapidly due to extensive word of mouth spreading from past sales and soon may exceed the firm’s capacity resulting in lost sales. To avoid this problem, companies generally delay product launch to build sufficient inventory prior to starting sa...