Introduction -- Retail valuation : how investors value product availability and inventory management -- Assortment planning : mining sales data to discover "home run" products you are missing -- Product life cycle planning : how to reinvent forecasting, inventory optimization, and markdown...

Eppen (1979) showed that inventory costs in a centralized system increase with the correlation between multivariate normal product demands. Using multivariate stochastic orders, we generalize this statement to arbitrary distributions. We then describe methods to construct models with arbitrary...