Component sharing--the use of a component on multiple products within a firm's product line--is widely practiced as a means of offering high variety at low cost. Although many researchers have examined trade-offs involved in component sharing, little research has focused on the impact of...

Internet technology has allowed for a higher degree of decoupling between the information-intensive sales process and the physical process of inventory management than its brick-and-mortar counterpart. As a result, some Internet retailers choose to outsource inventory and back-end operations to...

Using data from the U.S. bicycle industry, we examine the relation among product variety, supply chain structure, and firm performance. Variety imposes two types of costs on a supply chain: production costs and market mediation costs. Production costs include, among other costs, the incremental...

The bullwhip effect is the phenomenon of increasing demand variability in the supply chain from downstream echelons (retail) to upstream echelons (manufacturing). The objective of this study is to document the strength of the bullwhip effect in industry-level U.S. data. In particular, we say an...

This paper addresses the question of how the vertical structure of a product line relates to brand equity. Does the presence of “premium” or high-quality products in a product line enhance brand equity? Conversely, does the presence of “economy” or low-quality products in a product line...

User design offers tantalizing potential benefits to manufacturers and consumers, including a closer match of products to user preferences, which should result in a higher willingness to pay for goods and services. There are two fundamental approaches that can be taken to user design: systems...

The author engages with narratives of graduate single Indian Singaporean women based in global cities for work, namely Singapore, Melbourne, and London. She interrogates how and why these single women are often portrayed as incomplete, occupying a cusp where they are perceived as waiting for...

When making lot-sizing decisions, managers often use a model horizon T that is much smaller than any reasonable estimate of the firm's future horizon. This is done because forecast accuracy deteriorates rapidly for longer horizons, while computational burden increases. However, what is optimal...

Assembled product manufacturers often introduce line extensions that share components with existing products, or among themselves, resulting in cost interactions among products because of shared costs, and revenue interactions because of cannibalization. We present a cross-functional approach to...