Effect of ticket-switching on inventory and shelf-space allocation

摘要

Ticket-switching incidents simultaneously and directly affect the actual and store information system inventory of multiple products. We model the discrepancy in inventory information stored in the retailer's information system vs. reality and related consequences for the customer and the retail store. We also consider a retail store with constrained shelf-space availability and study how this retailer should optimally allocate shelf-space between these products when ticket-switching is present. We model this by taking into account the customer arrival sequence. For customers who use online store inventory information, our results indicate that in the presence of ticket-switching, an item can be guaranteed to be in-stock at the store for immediate pick-up only for ‘cheap’ items. The results from this study also have policy implications for retail stores in terms of computing benefit estimates as well as shelf-space allocation.