Inventories - Publications - Faculty & Research

29 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

How Much More Would Holiday Shoppers Pay to Wear Something Rare?

for the privilege of owning the hard-to-get red item—or how much less for the more plentiful black. They found that doubling inventory of an item reduces the willingness to pay by as much as 7 to 15 percent. “That’s one of the fundamental... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

01 Aug 2022
What Do You Think?

Does Religious Belief Affect Organizational Performance?

Corporate Governance Institute—Finance Working Paper No. 822/2022 Your feedback to last month’s column Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management? The majority of those commenting suggested that we have seen the peak of... View Details

Keywords: Re: James L. Heskett

2024
Case

EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite

By: Jacob M. Cook

In EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite, Shivani Bahl is attempting to sell EPCorp's CEO, Debbie Sullivan, on her ideas for not only a new website upgrade but also a more expansive vision on how data and Generative AI can be used to grow the company. Debbie is understandably... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; E-commerce; Growth and Development Strategy

Citation

Purchase

02 Apr 2024
Research & Ideas

Employees Out Sick? Inside One Company's Creative Approach to Staying Productive

Conquered Fast Fashion—and Forged a New Business Model Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management? Feedback or ideas to share? Email the Working Knowledge team at hbswk@hbs.edu. Image: Illustration created using images... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Fashion

16 Jun 2008
Research & Ideas

Seven Tips for Managing Price Increases

services that they truly need by giving them an unbundled menu of options. 6. Monitor Trade Terms. Beware of powerful distributors paying you more slowly than they turn the inventory they buy from you. In an inflationary environment,... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch

18 Mar 2013
HBS Case

HBS Cases: LEGO

turnaround book, but it doesn't work." One continuing problem: the company's growing complexity was choking it. Adding more bricks made products harder to assemble, forecasts harder to determine, and inventory harder to manage.... View Details

Keywords: by Maggie Starvish; Entertainment & Recreation

10 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

Why Are Prices So High Right Now—and Will They Ever Return to Normal?

After a year and a half, most inventory hit by temporary stockouts returned to pre-pandemic levels and inflation waned, “suggesting a gradual return to normalcy,” the researchers write. Yet in some areas, shortages turned into permanent... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

2018
Working Paper

Quantile Forecasts of Product Life Cycles Using Exponential Smoothing.

By: Xiaojia Guo, Kenneth C. Lichtendahl Jr. and Yael Grushka-Cockayne

We introduce an exponential smoothing model that a manager can use to forecast the demand of a new product or service. The model has five features that make it suitable for accurately forecasting product life cycles at scale. First, the trend in our model follows the... View Details

Keywords: New Product Development; Demand Forecasting; Product Adoption; Innovation Diffusion; Product Development; Demand and Consumers; Forecasting and Prediction; Adoption

Citation

SSRN

Read Now

12 Dec 2023
Research & Ideas

COVID Tested Global Supply Chains. Here’s How They’ve Adapted

You Might Also Like: Have We Seen the Peak of Just-in-Time Inventory Management? Fed Up Workers and Supply Woes: What's Next for Dollar Stores? COVID-19 Shines New Light on Working Conditions in Supply Chains Feedback or ideas to share?... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

24 May 2021
Op-Ed

Can Fabric Waste Become Fashion’s Resource?

COVID-19 has broken fashion’s supply chain. As a result, an already wasteful industry has become more wasteful. Even before the pandemic, the global apparel industry was producing about 92 million tons of textile waste a year. That’s about one garbage truck’s worth of... View Details

Keywords: by Geoffrey Jones and Shelly Xu; Fashion

01 Mar 2013
Working Paper Summaries

Hurry Up and Wait: Differential Impacts of Congestion, Bottleneck Pressure, and Predictability on Patient Length of Stay

Keywords: by Jaeker Berry Jillian & Anita L. Tucker; Health

20 Nov 2017
Research & Ideas

How Independent Bookstores Have Thrived in Spite of Amazon.com

by shopping at neighborhood businesses. Indie bookstores won customers back from Amazon, Borders, and other big players by stressing a strong connection to local community values. Curation: Independent booksellers began to focus on curating View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel (with video by Amelia Kunhardt); Retail

12 Nov 2012
Research & Ideas

Pay Workers More So They Steal Less

from chain stores and interviewed managers of nine convenience store chains. The first data set, for the year 1999, came from 76 stores in a midsize retail chain and was used to weigh cash shortage and inventory shrinkage, the two most... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard; Retail

Research Summary

Overview

By: Ayelet Israeli

Professor Israeli utilizes econometric methods and field experiments to study data driven decision making in marketing context. Her research focuses on data-driven marketing, with an emphasis on how businesses can leverage their own data, customer data, and market data... View Details

Keywords: Channel Management; Pricing; Pricing Policies; Online Marketing; E-commerce; Analytics; Econometrics; Field Experiments; Data Analytics; Artificial Intelligence; Value Of Data

01 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

A Bank That Takes Parmesan as Collateral: The Cheese Stands a Loan

producers face very long lead times," Trichakis says. "They basically have working capital tied to inventory for two years. They could shorten the maturation to cut down on costs, but then the cheese that we eat would not be as... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking; Food & Beverage

Teaching Interest

Decision Making Under Uncertainty

By: David E. Bell

Many of the decisions we face are made complicated by having uncertain consequences: how should I set my inventory when I don’t know what demand will be, should I refinance my mortgage when rates might go lower, how big a bet shall I make in a new business, and so... View Details

16 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

Has COVID-19 Broken the Global Value Chain?

lengthening of value chains, has allowed for a finer division of labor and greater gains from specialization—hyper-specialization—across countries. Just-in-time management practices also dictate holding minimal inventories to improve... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

28 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Supply Chain Risk: Deal With It

risk, Raman explains, has been through inventory. But "for numerous reasons, inventory became very expensive." Shorter product life cycles contribute to higher expenses, for example, in the personal computer market, where the... View Details

Keywords: by David Stauffer

07 Jun 2004
Research & Ideas

What Drives Supply Chain Behavior?

inventory management), production, and logistics. Many of these [academic] papers pursue an optimizing approach given the assumption of a completely rational decision maker. In a supply chain, however, these activities are usually spread... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston

31 Mar 2011
Research & Ideas

From SpinPop to SpinBrush: Entrepreneurial Lessons from John Osher

didn't suffer while the Dr. John's team worked out the kinks. The company didn't have a huge war chest, but Osher had raised additional capital after the company's launch in order to pay for additional inventory once the product took off.... View Details

Keywords: by Dennis Fisher; Consumer Products

Publications