Where to Cut the Long Tail? The Value of Carrying Inventory in Online Retail
利用欧洲家具零售商18个月的销售和库存数据，通过准自然实验发现，产品有库存平均能提升65%的销售额，且高价产品对库存的敏感度较低，为在线零售商决定哪些产品应持有库存提供了依据。
One advantage of online retail is that a large number of products can be displayed at low cost. However, online retailers must decide which of these products to carry in inventory (stock items) and which to order from suppliers when a customer places an order (nonstock items). In this paper, we empirically investigate how carrying a product in inventory affects its online sales. We use data from a European furniture and interior design retailer consisting of daily sales transactions and inventory data covering 18 months. We use a quasi-natural experiment—random transitions of products in and out of inventory at the retailer’s central warehouse—to estimate the causal effect of carrying inventory on sales. Our results show a strong and statistically significant increase in sales of, on average, 65% associated with having the product available in stock. More interestingly, this effect differs between products and is moderated by the price of the product: sales of more expensive products are less sensitive to the product being in stock. We use these results to draw insights on which types of items to carry in inventory. This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, operations management. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4777 .