Companies operating under gig-contractor models are offering part-time job requiring longer work availability. This ensures quicker delivery & better service quality. Using data from an online retailer we find that workers with similar level of experience perform differently. This is explained through the role of worker availability. At similar levels of experience, workers in high-work group perform better than those in the low-work group after controlling for task and worker characteristics.

New sustainability-marketed firms have emerged in the grocery and consumer packaged goods categories responding to consumers’ rising preferences for sustainable products. Motivated by this trend in the retail industry, we study how the entry of a new firm that sells an assortment of sustainable consumer goods affects the consumers’ channel choices and the existing retailers’ market shares in two different types of product offerings -- packaged and fresh goods.

Slow-moving items constitute a large share of the retail assortment and often result in intermittent orders by the retailer. We estimate retail channel inventories based on prior orders and Point-of-Sales data to predict the timing of future orders. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this an inventory modeling approach outperforms the Croston's method and thus provides a viable alternative to conventional time-series models.