the future economy would be a network-centric economy. networks yield more meaning to the concept of perfect competition market. the successful presence in the network-centric economy requires identification and application of new technologies. in today’s competitive business environment, everything is continuously changing and the only thing remains intact is change. environment pressures forc...

The Stahl model is one of the most applied consumer search models, with many applications and an empirical background. The present paper explores an extension where sellers have asymmetries, which is mostly excluded by the literature. Sellers with heterogeneous numbers of stores are introduced, reflecting a typical market structure. As in the original Stahl model, a market consists of several s...

An area supervisor managing an area chain of local urban retail stores faces the problem of determining the number of employees and allocating them to retail stores (workforce size and its allocation). We propose a model to maximize the overall expected profit rate of a coordinated area chain where employee absenteeism is uncertain. Retail stores operate as a Markovian loss queueing system. An ...

It is now a norm in the convenience store supply chain that a logistics company (or companies) provides logistics services to both chain stores and their suppliers. The coverage rate of stores has become the major factor for winning in the marketplace of chain store businesses. Logistics companies need to establish a logistics center for each market area to provide quick response to the stores ...

This paper investigates the spatial organization and dynamics of retail markets using establishment level data on entry, exit, and location choice in the retail alcoholic beverage industry. Establishments are classi ̄ed into two groups based on ̄rm a±liation: chain vs. stand-alone stores. Stand-alone stores are further broken down into two categories according to product lines o®ered: diversi ̄ed...

in recent years, supply chain management has developed into one of the most critical strategies for achieving competitive advantage in different industries and the supplier selection process has increasingly been distinguished as an important and vital decision in supply chain management of manufacturing and service industries. on the other hand, with so many suppliers having different capabili...