Increased consumer demand for healthier product options and looming regulation have prompted many consumer goods brands to adjust the amount of sugar content in their product lines, including adding products with reduced sugar content or smaller package sizes. Even as brands adopt such practices, little guidance exists for how they should do so to protect or enhance their brand performance. This paper studies whether and when sugar reduction strategies affect sales.

We quantify the causal effects of humorous banter among three rival fast-food brands on Twitter in the context of a new product launched by one of the rivals (viz, the focal or entrant brand). We argue that Twitter banter can cause a surge in online search that in turn leads to higher offline sales.

We examine the impact of logistics performance metrics such as delivery time, and customer’s requested delivery speed on logistics service ratings and third-party sellers’ sales on an e-commerce platform.

We compare several approaches for generating a prioritized list of products to be counted in a retail store, with the objective of detecting inventory record inaccuracy and unknown out-of-stocks. We consider both "rule-based" approaches, which sort products based on heuristic indices, and "model-based" approaches, which maintain probability distributions for the true inventory levels updated based on sales and replenishment observations.

We estimate the causal effects of employee-friendly scheduling practices on store financial performance at the US retailer Gap, Inc. The randomized field experiment evaluated a multi-component intervention designed to improve dimensions of work schedules – inconsistency, unpredictability, inadequacy, and lack-of-employee control – shown to undermine employee well-being and productivity.

We study differences in the effects of prices, non-price promotions, and brand line length on brand shares at different retail formats. Our conceptual framework rests on the presence of trip level fixed and category level variable utility components and shows how the trade-off between these components results in (i) different formats visited on different types of shopping trips; and (ii) differential marginal sensitivities of brand shares to changes in marketing mix variables across trip types.

In this paper, we empirically analyze the determinants of excess inventory announcement and the stock market reaction to the announcement in the US retail sector. We examine if the firm’s operational competence, as measured by total factor productivity (TFP), can explain the retailer’s excess inventory announcement. We also investigate if the stock market reaction to such announcements is conditional on the operational competence of the announcing firm. We use a combined dataset on excess inventory announcements, annual financial statements, and daily stock prices of publicly traded retailers in the USA between 1990 and 2011.