The operations management discipline has made substantial progress developing analytical models to help firms make tactical and strategic decisions (e.g., inventory control, assortment planning). The application of these models to real contexts requires several inputs, such as an estimate of the...

We propose a new Bayesian synthetic control framework to overcome limitations of extant synthetic control methods (SCMs). The proposed Bayesian synthetic control methods (BSCMs) do not impose any restrictive constraints on the parameter space a priori. Moreover, they provide statistical...

In many categories consumers display cyclical buying: they repeatedly purchase in the category for several periods, followed by several periods of not buying. We believe that the cyclicality is a manifestation of cross-category substitution by the consumer, caused by “variety seeking”...

We consider the problem of predicting sales of new and existing products using both numeric and textual data contained in consumer reviews. Many extant approaches require considerable manual pre-processing of the textual data, making the methods prohibitively expensive to implement and difficult...