We study the following question: How does competition influence the inventory holdings of General Motors' dealerships operating in isolated U.S. markets? We wish to disentangle two mechanisms by which local competition influences a dealer's inventory: (1) the entry or exit of a competitor can...

Automobile manufacturers in the U.S. supply chain exhibit significant differences in their days of supply of finished vehicles (average inventory divided by average daily sales rate). For example, from 1995 to 2004, Toyota consistently carried approximately 30 fewer days of supply than General...

Retailers must constantly strive for excellence in operations; extremely narrow profit margins leave little room for waste and inefficiency. This article reports a retailer's challenge to balance transportation, shelf space, and inventory costs. A retailer sells multiple products with stochastic...

In this paper we conduct an empirical investigation of a large-scale combinatorial auction (CA)--the Chilean auction for school meals in which the government procures half a billion dollars worth of meal services every year. Our empirical study is motivated by two fundamental aspects in the...

The newsvendor model captures the trade-off faced by a decision maker that needs to place a firm bet prior to the occurrence of a random event. Previous research in operations management has mostly focused on deriving the decision that minimizes the expected mismatch costs. In contrast, we...

We develop a structural demand model that endogenously captures the effect of out-of-stocks on customer choice by simulating a time-varying set of available alternatives. Our estimation method uses store-level data on sales and partial information on product availability. Our model allows for...