In this article, we analyze how retailers change their inventory investment behavior in response to macroeconomic shocks. We examine if service level, as measured by the ratio of stockout to inventory holding costs, can explain the differences in observed behavior across retailers. We use data on macroeconomic indicators and quarterly filings of US public retailers from 1985 to 2009 to estimate a dynamic model of short- and long-term impact of macroeconomic shocks on inventory investment.
In this study, we use hourly data on store traffic, sales, and labor from 41 stores of a large retail chain to identify the extent of understaffing in retail stores and quantify its impact on sales and profitability. Using an empirical model motivated from queueing theory, we calculate the benchmark staffing level for each store, and establish the presence of systematic understaffing during peak hours.
In this paper, we examine the relationship between inventory levels and one-year-ahead earnings of retailers using publicly available financial data. We use benchmarking metrics obtained from operations management literature to demonstrate an inverted-U relationship between abnormal inventory growth and one-year-ahead earnings per share for retailers.
In this paper, we examine how connecting to beneficiaries of one’s work increases performance, and argue that beneficiaries internal to an organization (i.e., one’s own colleague) can serve as an important source of motivation, even in jobs that — on the surface — may seem routine and low on potential impact. We suggest that this occurs because words of beneficiaries strengthen one’s sense of belongingness, a key driver of human behavior.
How best to structure the work day is an important operational question for organizations. A key structural consideration is the effective use of breaks from work. Breaks serve the critical purpose of allowing employees to recharge, but in the short term, translate to a loss of time that usually leads to reduced productivity. We evaluate the effects of two types of breaks (expected versus unexpected), and two distinct forms of unexpected breaks, and find that unexpected breaks can, under certain conditions, yield immediate post-break performance increases.
We undertake an empirical study of the impact of delay announcements on callers' abandonment behavior and the performance of a call center with two priority classes. A Cox regression analysis reveals that in this call center, callers' abandonment behavior is affected by the announcement messages heard.
We model callers' decision making process in call centers as an optimal stopping problem. After each period of waiting, a caller decides whether to abandon or to continue to wait. The utility of a caller is modeled as a function of her waiting cost and reward for service.
CRM refers to processes that involve interaction with end-users or customers. The increased emphasis on CRM today stems from changes in the business environment, availability of large amounts of data and advances in information technology. Outsourcing of customer relationship management (CRM) processes is rapidly becoming a competitive imperative for firms. However, there is little evidence on why the performance implications of outsourcing CRM processes differ so much across firms.
Policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems. Consider the case of the ECB Securities Markets Programme: If Eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations, looking at daily price changes may bias downwards the correlation between yields and the amounts of bonds purchased.
The hypercompetitive aspects of modern business environments have drawn organizational attention toward agility as a strategic capability. Information technologies are expected to be an important competency in the development of organizational agility.
Our country's cities, towns and rural communities hold the key to understanding current and forecasted national trends – but for far too long, our nation’s microeconomic data has been lacking. The American Growth Project is here to help.
We consider the problem of minimizing daily expected resource usage and overtime costs across multiple parallel resources such as anesthesiologists and operating rooms, which are used to conduct a variety of surgical procedures at large multispecialty hospitals. To address this problem, we develop a two-stage, mixed-integer stochastic dynamic programming model with recourse.
Institute Research Fellow Christian Lundblad discussed the morning's employment report, factors the Federal Reserve is considering before possibly cutting interest rates at its next meeting, and the vital role that government economic data plays.
How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can increase their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work more quickly.
The Great Recession of 2008 came with a counterintuitive twist – the unprecedented growth of minority-owned small businesses in the U.S. But although the data shows that the representation of minority firms in the small business ecosystem increased from 2007 to 2012 while the percentage of white-owned firms decreased, the larger question is whether those minority firms also made headway toward achieving equity or parity with white-owned businesses.
McNamee is the author of the New York Times best-selling book, “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe,” which chronicles his early mentorship of Mark Zuckerberg and other tech leaders, and his subsequent realization that the Facebook platform and its legitimate advertising tools were being manipulated by “bad actors.”
Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown and University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor Steve Kaplan have co-authored a new white paper assembling the most current, comprehensive performance data on U.S. private equity buyout funds available. Contrary to some recent articles, this research shows U.S. buyouts have consistently outperformed public markets in the post-crisis era.
The selection of novel ideas is vital to the development of truly innovative products. Firms often turn to idea crowdsourcing challenges, in which both ideators and the seeker firms participate in the idea selection process. Yet prior research cautions that ideators and seeker firms may not select novel ideas. To address the links between idea novelty and selection, this study proposes a bi-faceted notion of idea novelty and probes the role of task structure.
This paper studies the investment decisions and price impact of non-resident foreigners in the Paris housing market, employing unique micro-level transaction data over the period 1992–2016. We find that these “out-of-country” buyers generally purchase relatively small but high-quality properties in desirable neighborhoods and in areas with high ratios of compatriots.
Marketers create social media, in the form of firm-generated content (FGC), to ignite interest in new products such as movies; in turn, there is a clear need to understand whether and how FGC influences demand. With a descriptive study, the authors investigate two potential mechanisms by which FGC may drive box office revenues.