Current Research
Description
I am interested in research on various topics in retail operations and supply chain management, including inventory management, product variety, distribution logistics, financial performance of retailers, and linking operational performance to financial performance. One of my ongoing projects uses aggregate firm-level data for retailers to address questions related to benchmarking inventory turnover, measuring performance improvements, and forecasting future sales. In one of my papers on this topic, co-authored with Ananth Raman and Saravanan Kesavan, we are able to generate better sales forecasts for retailers than financial analysts. Another project deals with modeling the effect of consumer choice behavior on optimal retail assortments and competitive strategies for retailers. This work is co-authored with Dorothee Honhon and Young-Hoon Park. A third project deals with research on the interface of operations and finance, specifically, how information from financial markets can be used to improve operational decisions, and how market incompleteness influences the value of real assets. This work is co-authored with Sridhar Seshadri and Marti Subrahmanyam.