This paper presents an inventory management policy for a retailer offering a layaway program. Layaway is a service provided by retailers that allows budget constrained consumers who have sufficiently high valuations to pay for a product in several installments rather than at once and obtain the...

In this paper, we explore the importance of accounting for climate when determining the impact of weather on product sales. Using a France-wide scanner panel dataset provided by our industry partner, we show that if climate is not accounted for, product categories may be misclassified as being...

Owing to information asymmetry, evaluating the credit risk of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is difficult. While previous studies evaluating the credit risk of SMEs have mostly focused on intrinsic risk generated by SMEs, our study considers both intrinsic and relational risks...

In this paper, we explore the importance of accounting for climate when determining the impact of weather on product sales. Using a France-wide scanner panel data set we show that if one does not account for climate, then product categories may be misclassified as being weather sensitive when...

Grocery shopping is a necessity. The COVID-19 pandemic created unprecedented disruptions to all aspects of life including grocery shopping. Many households found it difficult to replace in-store shopping channels as governments enforced closures. The purpose of this study is to uncover how...

The use of discretization in decision analysis allows practitioners to use only a few assessments to estimate the certain equivalent (CE) or expected value of a decision without knowing the functional form of the distribution of each uncertainty. The discretization shortcuts are fast, but are...

The use of discretization in decision analysis allows practitioners to use only a few assessments to estimate the certain equivalent (CE) or expected value of a decision without knowing the functional form of the distribution of each uncertainty. The discretization shortcuts are fast, but are...

Engineering and Applied Sciences