Retail format selection in on-the-go shopping situations

Consumers patronize different store formats to purchase products. Prior literature describes store and format choices for big, multi-item shopping baskets, but limited insights determine consumers' unique shopping routines when they seek to buy just one or a few items while on the go. Such shopping situations might affect consumers' format selections for both search and experience goods. This study uses multi-attribute utility theory to develop a framework, tested with a scenario-based experiment. For search goods, a format's economic utility (price level, speed) is more important; its functional utility (quality, variety) and psychological utility (atmosphere, service) become less important considerations. Furthermore, the tolerable range of formats is larger for search goods. The level of on-the-go purchase and consumption frequency moderates these effects. Therefore, this research helps to clarify what drives consumers' format selections in on-the-go shopping situations, with useful managerial insights for how retailers can compete in the growing on-the-go market

The value of crowdsourcing in apparel and fashion retail buying

Includes vita[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] Apparel and fashion retail buyers are responsible for selecting and ordering products, on behalf of the retailer, to be sold to retailers' end-consumers. Compared to their counterparts in other retailing sectors, fashion buyers face unique challenges such as high demand uncertainty and volatility, seasonality, frequent changes in fashion trends, and short product life cycles. As previous trends rarely provide useful information for predicting future sales of trendy products, fashion buyers make a subjective assessment of products' future demand by relying on their intuition and perceived expertise. Industry reports show that fashion buyers' predictions are often far from the demand that is later realized causing loss of profits for retailers. In this dissertation. I argue that retailers can benefit from the Wisdom of the Crowd (WOC) in predicting future sales of fashion products. It is suggested that lay customers as a group can provide more accurate prediction of future demand of fashion products than individual fashion buyers. An empirical study is conducted to test this proposition involving two groups: professional fashion buyers (N=60) and lay customers (N=397). Customers predicted future sales of products in all six product categories that were used in the study. The prediction error, measured by MAPE, was reduced between 12 and 73 percent. The implication of these findings for retailers are discussed, and directions for implementing crowdsourcing in fashion buying to improve prediction accuracy are provided.Includes bibliographical reference

Evaluation of the Current State of Distributed Watershed Nutrient Water Quality Modeling

Watershed models have been widely used for creating the scientific basis for management decisions regarding nonpoint source pollution. In this study, we evaluated the current state of watershed scale, spatially distributed, process-based, water quality modeling of nutrient pollution. Beginning from 1992, the year when Beven and Binley published their seminal paper on uncertainty analysis in hydrological modeling, and ending in 2010, we selected 257 scientific publications which (i) employed spatially distributed modeling approaches at a watershed scale; (ii) provided predictions of flow, nutrient/sediment concentrations or loads; and (iii) reported fit to measured data. Most “best practices” (optimization, validation, sensitivity, and uncertainty analysis) are not consistently employed during model development. There are no statistically significant differences in model performance among land uses. Studies which used more than one point in space to evaluate their distributed models had significantly lower median values of the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (0.70 vs 0.56, <i>p</i> < 0.005, nonparametric Mann–Whitney test), and <i>r</i>² (<i>p</i> < 0.005). This finding suggests that model calibration only to the basin outlet may mask compensation of positive and negative errors of source and transportation processes. We conclude by advocating a number of new directions for distributed watershed modeling, including in-depth uncertainty analysis and the use of additional information, not necessarily related to model end points, to constrain parameter estimation

<b>Supplemental Material - Constructive Resistance in the Frontlines: How Frontline Employees’ Resistance to Customer Incivility Affects Customer Observers</b>

Supplemental Material for Constructive Resistance in the Frontlines: How Frontline Employees’ Resistance to Customer Incivility Affects Customer Observers by Omid Kamran-Disfani, Ramin Bagherzadeh, Ashok Bhattarai, Maryam Farhang, and Lisa K. Scheer. Martin in Journal of Service Research</p