Brand and Product Management

Scarcity has long been known to impact consumers' choices. Yet, the impact of shelf-based scarcity in retail environments, created by stocking level depletion, has received almost no attention in the literature. Indeed, little research to date has even examined if consumers will attend to shelf-based scarcity in retail environments, much less how this cue can impact choice. A priori, given the inherently noisy and cue-filled nature of retail environments, it is quite reasonable to expect that shelf-based scarcity would play little to no role in consumers' choices.

Capacity decisions in service operations often involve a trade-off between operating cost and the level of service offered to customers. Although the cost of attaining a pre-specified level of service has been well-studied, there isn't much research studying how customer service levels affect revenue and profit. This paper conducts an empirical study to analyze how waiting in a queue in the context of a retail store affects customer purchasing behavior. Our methodology uses a novel technology based on digital imaging to record periodic information about the queuing system.

We examine how consumers update their confidences in ordinal (relative) judgments while evaluating sequential product-ranking and source-accuracy data in percentage versus frequency formats. The results show that when sequential data are relatively easier to mathematically combine (e.g., percentage data), consumers revise their judgments in a way that is consistent with an averaging model but inconsistent with the normative Bayesian model.

Combinatorial auctions (CAs) are multi-unit auction mechanisms in which bidders can bid on combinations of items or packages. CAs have received considerable attention from academia, and their practical use has increased significantly over recent years especially in procurement projects. Units in procurement projects often exhibit cost synergies, and using a CA can be particularly advantageous to the auctioneer because it enables bidders to express their cost synergies in the bidding process.

The measurement and timing of reported revenue is critical to performance measurement and the development of accurate forecasting models. GM used incentives to get customers to buy its vehicles. This case asks students to consider how GM should report the sales so that the data is a valid indication of performance and can be used to accurately forecast future sales.

We develop a theoretical model to investigate the incentives for coordinating the positioning and pricing of horizontally differentiated products in the context of a vertical trading relationship between a retailer and multiple suppliers. We also use the model to analyze various trading relationships, such as category management, and characterize the channel efficiency of each, leading to interesting insights about when such practices may be most effective.

Consider a firm that sells products over repeated seasons, each of which includes a full-price period and a markdown period. The firm may deliberately understock products in the markdown period to induce high-value customers to purchase early at full price. Customers cannot perfectly anticipate availability. Instead, they use observed past capacities to form capacity expectations according to a heuristic smoothing rule. Based on their expectations of capacity, customers decide to buy either in the full-price period or in the markdown period.