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Published on: July 24, 2017
Data-driven and people-centric operations: Research opportunities in retail operations
Yuanzheng Ma1, Yating Zhang2, Huan Zheng2
1School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
None:
This paper reviews advances and research trends in retail operations. Retailers can now collect and utilize granular operations and behavioral data to understand their consumers and employees and make fine-tuned decisions to enhance consumer experience. This trend brings opportunities and challenges in retail operations, such as designing dynamic assortments and blind boxes using various data collected from consumers' shopping experiences. These fine-tuned algorithms may also raise privacy concerns of consumers and algorithmic aversion behaviors from workers. Therefore, designing data-driven and people-centric operations rules is an emerging research topic in retail operations. In this paper, we review data-driven and people-centric studies in several key steps of the shopping and fulfillment process: consumer targeting, product design, assortment and pricing, store operations, last-mile operations, and warehouse operations. We also point out future research directions.
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