We predict that societal culture will have a significant impact on inventory management by (1) causing behavioral biases on individual decision makers and (2) affecting the organizational culture. In this paper, we look at the national inventory levels with a dataset that spans the globe. We find that all national characteristics have a statistically significant impact on managing inventory, some in counter-intuitive ways. We also discuss the impact of development status of nations.

Retailers in e-commerce are facing muti-sources of supply chain complexity, making accurate inventory records increasingly important while greatly challenged. This study systematically explores how supply chain complexity affects IRI using a hierarchical segmentation of the complexity sources in e-commerce. Our research contributes a hierarchical framework for supply chain complexity and complements existing literature regarding IRI by systematically analyzing its causes.

We asymptotically characterize and compare risk pooling approaches. We show that physical pooling dominates information pooling in settings with no additional per-location costs. In the presence of such costs, however, information pooling becomes a viable alternative to physical pooling. Through asymptotic analysis, we also address the grouping problem. The convergence of the expected total costs and the base stock levels are demonstrated through a simple numerical illustration.

We develop an optimization framework for infrastructure development to mitigate the risk of flooding caused by sea level rise and storm surge in a coastal area. Expected flood costs are included using a range of possible sea level rise scenarios, and investment costs are modeled for overall infrastructure development assuming budgetary limitations. Using the City of Boston as a case for this study, our methodology resulted in more than 90% cost reduction compared to a “do nothing” strategy.

We analyze the performance of simple (static) pricing policies for the joint pricing and inventory control problem. Compared to dynamic pricing policies, static pricing policies are more tractable, easier to implement and strategy-proof. We consider a continuous review system with Poisson arrivals of unit demand. We construct simple pricing policies that only increase inventory costs by a constant factor while actually increasing revenue, in comparison with the optimal dynamic pricing policy.

This paper investigates the impact of bilateral relationships on contracting incentives in a supply chain from a behavioral perspective. Our experimental data suggests systematic deviations from the theoretical benchmark and reveal behavioral regularities on contracting behavior. We develop a new behavioral theory where a firm's unfavorable bargaining position inflicts distress to a firm. We show that our behavioral theory explains and predicts supply contract bargaining incentives well.

We study the impact of assortment size on consumer choice decisions in an online recommender system context. Via a field experiment on Alibaba's online retail platforms, we causally show that the both consumers' search and purchase likelihoods first increase and then decrease as the number of options increases. We develop a two-stage consumer choice model and demonstrate that our empirical results are consistent with the predictions of a model that incorporates consumers' anticipated regret.