Internet technology has allowed for a higher degree of de-coupling 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 in...

We consider the problem of dynamically cross-selling products (e.g., books) or services (e.g., travel reservations) in the e-commerce setting. In particular, we look at a company that faces a stream of stochastic customer arrivals and may offer each customer a choice between the requested...

We describe a methodology by which a retailer can identify action steps that are likely to increase sales and customer satisfaction and demonstrate the methodology using proprietary data from a large retailer with over 500 stores. We use monthly store-level data on a number of operational...

After the cost of goods sold, store labor expense is the largest cost component in the retailing industry. As a result, developing and executing labor plans is a key task for retailers. In this paper we use private data provided by a large retail chain to assess the relationship between labor...

We describe a three-step process that a retailer can use to set retail store sales staff levels. First, use historical data on revenue and planned and actual staffing levels by store to estimate how revenue varies with the staffing level at each store. We disentangle the endogeneity between...