In the past few decades multi-store retailers, especially those with a hundred or more stores, have experienced substantial growth. At the same time, there is widely reported public outcry over the impact of these chain stores on small retailers and local communities. This paper develops an empirical model to assess the impact of chain stores on the profitability and entry/exit decisions of sma...

Accurate inventory is a key to effective supply chain management and store execution, affecting forecasting, ordering, and replenishment. Prior empirical research, however, shows that retailer perpetual inventory (PI) is inherently inaccurate. Radio frequency identification (RFID)-technology enables visibility into the movement of inventories within the supply chain. This research investigates ...

A model of a retail chain is developed in which store managers continually search for better practices. Search takes place over a rugged landscape defined over the space of store practices. The main objective of this research is to determine how the amount of discretion given to store managers as to how they run their stores influences the rate of innovation at the store level. We find that gre...

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The Supermarket Supply Chain Example A few years ago, I was enlisted by an executive vice-president of a large American supermarket chain to help focus their improvement efforts at their semi-annual supply chain conference. This supermarket corporation operated 1,800 retail stores and 125 distribution centers throughout the western two-thirds of the United States. The 35 participants in this su...

In the past few decades the retail industry has experienced substantial growth in multistore retailers, especially chains with a hundred or more stores. At the same time, there is widely reported public outcry over the impact of these chain stores on small retailers and local communities. This paper develops an empirical model to assess the impact of chain stores on the profitability and entry/...

It is important for national chain stores to be able to customize their prices in individual stores to adapt to the neighborhood demand. A lot of stores collect scanner data which can be used to determine the price distribution over products which optimizes profits, and yet often this data resource is under-utilized. In previous research both parametric (such as linear regression) and non-param...