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Recently, traditional manufacturing industries have faced two serious gaps and problems in line with effective product-line sales forecasting methods to balance the negative impacts on the performance of the subjective experience, including (1) arbitrary judgment, such as growth rate of expectancy, manager's experiences, and historical sales data, may cause inaccurately predictive results and severe negative effects, and (2) sales forecasting is a key priority and challenge in the context of considerable product lines that have different properties and need specific models for supporting decision analytics. This study is motivated to propose an advanced hybrid model to utilize the advantages of variation for methods of fuzzy time series (FTS), exponential smoothing (ES), moving average (MA), and regression analysis (RA). To analyze the four product lines—stably growing product (SGP), declining product (DP), irregularly growing product (IGP), and special sales product (SSP)—this study is based on empirical sales data from a leading traditional manufacturer to accurately identify the high potentials of decisive key factors and objectively evaluate the model. Two evaluation standards—the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE), a parameter sensitivity analysis, and comparative analysis—are measured. After implementing the data from the case study, four key reports were conclusively identified. (1) Purely for the RMSE, the best one (10.32) is the ES method in the SGP line. (2) In the DP line, the better one is the RA(2) method, with a relatively low MAPE of 17.78% and RMSE of 26.46. (3) The FTS method is the best choice (MAPE 12.41% and RMSE 18.98) for the IGP line. (4) For the SSP line, the better one (MAPE 24.05 and RMSE 29.34) is the MA method. According to the above reports, although the proposed hybrid model has a general performance for the SSP line, it still has a superior predictor when compared to manager subjective prediction. Interestingly, the proposed model is rarely used, has a new trial with an innovative solution for the traditional manufacturer, and thus realizes applicable values. The study concludes with acceptable and satisfactory results and yields seven important findings and three managerial implications that significantly contribute to decision-making reference for complete sales-production planning for interested parties. Thus, this study benefits and values a conventional industry upgrade from novel application techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship between organizational culture and quality of work life of executives in selected FMGCs in Tamil Nadu. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between organizational culture and employees' quality of work life. The component of organizational culture is effective leadership, effective communication, accountability, healthy environment. The research design used in this study is descriptive research design. The sample units in this research are employees of selected FMGCs. A convenience sample of 100 employees was taken. Primary data was collected from employees through questionnaire. Secondary data was collected from company records and company website. Important statistical tools used in this 'calculation are: percentage, weighted mean method, ANOVA (two way classification) Hypotheses for this research is no significant difference between experiences, significant difference between experiences, no significant difference between grades. Research Findings:-There is a direct and significant relationship between organizational culture and the quality of work life of employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, we consider a newsvendor system with strategic customers, who are boundedly rational and risk averse in terms of buying during the selling season or waiting for a clearance sale with price discounts. The newsvendor's decision is to determine the optimal stock quantity. An optimization problem is formulated with the incorporation of competition among strategic customers with private product value information. We embed risk aversion within the quantal response equilibrium to characterize the strategic customer behavior. The influences of the decision biases of strategic customers on the newsvendor's decision and profit are discussed. We find that the risk aversion considered alone always benefits the newsvendor. However, the bounded rationality considered alone benefits the newsvendor conditionally. Combining the two behavioral factor influences, the decision biases cause the newsvendor to order more and be better off when the critical fractile is high but to order less and be worse off when the critical fractile is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of FinanzRundschau is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While interest from the practitioner community in topics pertaining to global sales forces continues to accelerate, academic sales research that examines the challenges faced by these salespeople and their firms continues to lag behind. In response, the American Marketing Association (AMA) Sales Special Interest Group (Sales SIG) has recently developed an initiative designed to increase access to global sales force data. The initiative provides periodic, "snapshots" of the profession, via survey data, that can be used to guide sales scholars' research agendas and provide critical insight into challenges facing salespeople across the globe. Recently, a group of sales scholars gathered to discuss the initial survey results from B2B salespeople in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, and India. This manuscript reveals the interesting commonalities—and distinctions—between salespeople in those various countries on issues related to turnover, education and training, compensation, bureaucracy, technology usage, ethics, and macro-level challenges. Additionally, a subsequent discussion of the results, which we detail in this manuscript, reveals fruitful and important future research opportunities for sales scholars interested in global sales research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promotion keywords (e.g. sale, clearance) are a frequent component of retail advertising, store signage, and point-of-purchase displays. Despite retailers' frequent use of promotion keywords, past research has not examined their meaning. To address this void, the authors conducted studies examining both consumers' and retail managers' perceptions of promotional keywords within the United States market. Using an experimental approach, the authors predict and find that clearance leads to relatively deep retail discount expectations compared to sale (across samples including consumers and retail managers) and that the attractiveness of price promotions is dependent upon associated promotional keywords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have been witnessing the dual trend of retailers offering increasingly flexible consumer return policies and the rise in clearance sales and the number of off-price clearance channels. We model and connect these two trends by making the salvage/clearance price endogenous and ask the question of whether the retailers can continue to be better off without restricting their return policies, even if they end up with lower clearance prices. Interestingly, compared with a setting with no returns, although the retailers' clearance price will be lower, we show that they would be better off with flexible return policies when the bargain hunter segment's valuation heterogeneity is above a certain threshold. We show that this result holds in both store-clearance and the two types of off-price clearance-channel settings in which multiple retailers clear their excess stock through an intermediary. We also show that the expected clearance price in off-price clearance channels is higher than the clearance price in store-clearance setting with and without returns. We believe that these two results jointly explain both trends of offering flexible return policies and the rise in off-price clearance channel business in the retail industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem definition: We study the adherence to the recommendations of a decision support system (DSS) for clearance markdowns at Zara, the Spanish fast fashion retailer. Our focus is on behavioral drivers of the decision to deviate from the recommendation, and the magnitude of the deviation when it occurs. Academic/practical relevance: A major obstacle in the implementation of prescriptive analytics is users' lack of trust in the tool, which leads to status quo bias. Understanding the behavioral aspects of managers' usage of these tools, as well as the specific biases that affect managers in revenue management contexts, is paramount for a successful rollout. Methodology: We use data collected by Zara during seven clearance sales campaigns to analyze the drivers of managers' adherence to the DSS. Results: Adherence to the DSS's recommendations was higher, and deviations were smaller, when the products were predicted to run out before the end of the campaign, consistent with the fact that inventory and sales were more salient to managers than revenue. When there was a higher number of prices to set, managers of Zara's own stores were more likely to deviate from the DSS's recommendations, whereas franchise managers did the opposite and showed a weak tendency to adhere more often instead. Two interventions aimed at shifting salience from inventory and sales to revenue helped increase adherence and overall revenue. Managerial implications: Our findings provide insights on how to increase voluntary adherence that can be used in any context in which a company wants an analytical tool to be adopted organically by its users. We also shed light on two common biases that can affect managers in a revenue management context, namely salience of inventory and sales, and cognitive workload. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.1166. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agri-food production must increase while food waste needs to be reduced for improving the position of farmers. To do so it is necessary to sustainably manage agri-food supply chains beginning with the crop planning decisions. Although the centralized approach has usually been adopted for this purpose, it can lead to unfair solutions due to inequitable distribution of profits among farmers causing their unwillingness to collaborate in the implementation of decisions made. To solve this, in this paper a novel centralized multi-objective mathematical programming model is proposed to support the sustainable crop planning definition for a region that jointly optimize three objectives aligned to the sustainability aspects: supply chain profits maximization (economic objective), waste minimization (environmental objective) and unfairness among farmers minimization (social objective), being the last two objectives novel in the crop planning literature. It has also shown the conflicting nature of the three objectives finding trade-offs among them. Other novelties of this proposal are: (1) anticipation of operative decisions (such as harvest, transport, sale, clearance sale, waste and unmet demand) when defining the crop planning, (2) possibility of clearing the oversupply of crops as a means of increasing the farmers' profits and reducing waste, and (3) the modelling of a agri-food supply chain characterized by the lack of intermediaries between farmers and retailers, fostering the freshest product delivery and farmers' power position. The model is solved by applying the weighted sum method concluding that the crop waste generated along the chain and the unfairness among farmers can be considerably reduced by little decreasing the optimal SC profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates monopolist sales strategies, especially a clearance sales strategy in which the firm keeps unsold products in stock and sells them at a discounted price in the next period. I focus on the effect of new product introduction on consumer behavior by using a durable-goods monopolist model with demand uncertainty. The result shows that without the introduction of new versions of products, clearance sales never occur. On the contrary, when new versions of products are released, clearance sales strategy can be used, when the excess supply is not expected to be that large. It is shown that new product introduction and replacement behavior play an important role in clearance sales strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retailers have increasingly pursued initiatives to combine inventory located throughout their enterprise into a single stock from which customers anywhere in their distribution network may purchase. Also known as inventory pooling, this practice is well known to generate operational value by reducing inventory requirements and stock-outs. In "Inventory Integration with Rational Consumers," Aflaki and Swinney examine a different consequence of pooling: how it influences customer purchasing behavior. They show that integration can lead to behavioral consequences resulting from changing customer purchasing incentives, especially for seasonal goods that are sold in end-of-season clearance sales. These behavioral effects can be negative, and can even outweigh the operational benefits of pooling, if pooling leads to an increase in clearance sale inventory availability that encourages more customers to wait for discounts before buying. Specific conditions that lead to negative (or positive) behavioral value of integration are discussed. Overall, the results illustrate that the ways customers react to inventory pooling can be just as important as its operational consequences. We study the value of inventory integration (or pooling) for a firm selling a seasonal good over two periods: in the first period the firm charges a high price, and in the second period the firm charges a low price to clear remaining inventory. Consumers are rational and decide when to visit the firm based on the price of the product and its anticipated availability. We show that integration—which combines inventory from distinct selling channels or geographic regions, for example, online and offline channels or two physical locations, into a single virtual stock from which any consumer demand may be fulfilled—possesses both operational and behavioral value in this setting. The operational value, which results from better matching of supply and demand, is always positive; however, the behavioral value, which results from the way integration influences inventory availability and hence consumer purchasing incentives, can be positive or negative. Negative behavioral value occurs when integration increases inventory availability in the second period and encourages more consumers to delay a purchase to obtain a lower price; this may significantly reduce, and even make negative, the total value of integration. We show that negative behavioral value of integration is most likely to occur when demand variability is high, the underlying markets are sufficiently correlated, and the salvage value-to-cost ratio is low. We also consider how three additional factors influence the value of integration, and find that the behavioral value of integration is more likely to be negative when the clearance price is endogenously determined as opposed to fixed ex ante or when the component market demands are more asymmetric; however, behavioral value is more likely to be positive when consumers incur visit costs. We conclude that rational consumer behavior can play a substantial role in determining the value of inventory integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]