retail

Optimizing Service using High Dimensional Panel Data

Funded Research Proposal

We study how retail stores’ multi-dimensioned service levels affect consumers’ buying behavior in a spatial setting. To this end, we propose the Double Block-Lasso BLP estimator, which combines the double selection procedure introduced in Belloni, Chernozhukov, and Hansen (2014), with demand estimation methods set forth in Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995).…Read More

Responses to Rival Exit: Product Variety, Market Expansion, and Preexisting Market Structure

Published Research

This study investigates incumbent responses to a main rival’s exit. We argue that long‐time rivals have developed an equilibrium by offering a mix of overlapping and unique products and by choosing geographic proximity to each other. A rival’s exit, however, disrupts this equilibrium and motivates surviving firms to expand in both product and geographic spaces to seek a new equilibrium. …Read More

Offline Showrooms in Omni-channel Retail: Demand and Operational Benefits

Published Research

Omni-channel environments where customers can shop online and offline at the same retailer are increasingly ubiquitous. Furthermore, the presence of both channels has important implications for customer demand and operational issues such as product returns.…Read More

The Store is Dead — Long Live the Store

Published Research

Offline demise and offline renaissance is the paradox of new retail writ large. Swiss multinational financial services company Credit Suisse projects that by the time the numbers are in, more than 8,500 stores in the United States will have closed in 2017.…Read More

Agency Selling or Reselling? Channel Structures in Electronic Retailing

Published Research

In recent years, online retailers (also called e-tailers) have started allowing manufacturers direct access to their customers while charging a fee for providing this access, a format commonly referred to as agency selling. In this paper, we use a stylized theoretical model to answer a key question that e-tailers are facing: When should they use an agency selling format instead of using the more conventional reselling format?…Read More

Location Is (Still) Everything: The Surprising Influence of the Real World on How We Search, Shop, and Sell in the Virtual One 

Published Research

Conventional wisdom holds that the internet makes the world flat and reduces friction by erasing the impact of the physical world on our buying habits. But Wharton professor David Bell argues that the way we use the internet is still largely shaped by the physical world we inhabit.…Read More

Preference Minorities and the Internet

Published Research

Offline retailers face trading area and shelf space constraints, so they offer products tailored to the needs of the majority. Consumers whose preferences are dissimilar to the majority — “preference minorities” — are underserved offline and should be more likely to shop online. The authors use sales data from Diapers.com, the leading U.S. online retailer for baby diapers, to show why geographic variation in preference minority status of target customers explains geographic variation in online sales.…Read More