Timing of Seasonal Sales
By P. Courty, Hao Li. 1999
We present a model of timing of seasonal sales where stores choose several designs at the beginning of the season without knowing wich one, if any, will be fashionable. Fashionable designs have a chance to fetch high prices in fashion markets while non-fashionable ones must be sold in a discount market. In the beginning of the season, stores charge high prices in the hope of capturing their fashion market. As the end of the season approaches with goods still on the shelves, stores adjust downward their expectations that they are carrying a fashionable design, and may have sales to capture the discount market. Having a greater number of designs induces a store to put one of them on sales earlier to test the market. Moreover, price competition in the discount market induces stores to start sales earlier because of a greater perceived first-mover advantage in capturing the discount market. More competition, perhaps due to decreases in the cost of product innovation, makes sales occur even earlier. These results are consistent with the observation that the trend toward earlier sales since mid-1970's coincides with increasing product varieties in fashion good markets and increasing store competition.
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
Citations in the corpus
- Temporal Fusion Transformers for Interpretable Multi-horizon Time Series Forecasting (2019, background): “in retail [5, 10], medicine [26, 42] and economics [6], improvements in existing methods bear much significance for practitioners in many domains.”
- TSMixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Time Series Forecasting (2023, background): “Time series forecasting is a prevalent problem in numerous real-world use cases, such as for forecasting of demand of products (Böse et al., 2017; Courty & Li, 1999), pandemic spread (Zhang & Nawata, 2018), and inflation rates (Capistrán et al., 2010).”
- An overview of pricing models for revenue management (2003, background): “Other related work on the timing of sales and promotions can be found in Courty and Li (1999), Krider and Weinberg (1998), Warner and Barsky (1995), and Kinberg and Rao (1975).”
- One Fits All: Power General Time Series Analysis by Pretrained LM (2023, background): “…(2021) that has played an important role in many real-world applications Wen et al. (2022), such as retail sales forecasting Böse et al. (2017); Courty & Li (1999) , imputation of missing data for economic time series Friedman (1962) anomaly detection for industrial maintenance Gao et al.…”