Ecological Rationality of Demand Chasing

Posted on Tue 06 May 2014 in Core OM and supply chain • Tagged with demand chasing, behavioral OM

Experimental literature that has looked at newsvendor decision-making documents a phenomenon called demand chasing wherein a decision-maker adjusts her order quantity in each period toward the demand realization in past period. This behavior is so obviously “irrational” (given the typical newsvendor setup where each period’s demand is statistically independent …


Continue reading

"Random" Ordering pattern from Deterministic Demand?

Posted on Sun 16 February 2014 in Core OM and supply chain • Tagged with randomness, chaos

While Prof. Sridhar Seshadri and I were co-teaching a PhD course where we were reading John Sterman’s paper on determistic chaos (Sterman, J., 1989. Deterministic Chaos in an Experimental Economic System Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.), we were discussing the possibility of how determistic customer demands in simple …


Continue reading

Why won’t firms provide worker training if there is a “skills gap” ?

Posted on Tue 07 January 2014 in Random Thoughts • Tagged with random thoughts

Manufacturing sector in India is projected to have a very large short-fall of skilled workers (90 million by the year 2022, according to National Skills Development Corporation). Executives consistently stress that “skill development is the most pressing challenge to the manufacturing sector in India” (report from World Economic Forum). Recommendation …


Continue reading

On last digit of prices

Posted on Mon 22 April 2013 in Random Thoughts • Tagged with random thoughts

I had obtained data on the prices and the popularity rank of some 600 odd products from Flipkart.com website for a different project. Given that I had this data, it seemed like an interesting experiment to see if conventional wisdom that marketers like to have prices end in ‘9 …


Continue reading