A classification of the literature on the planning of substitutable products

Hojung Shin, Soohoon Park, Euncheol Lee and W.C. Benton

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 246, issue 3, 686-699

Abstract: A company's assortment of products and corresponding inventory levels are constrained by available resources, such as production capacity, storage space, and capital to acquire the inventory. Thus, customers may not always be able to find a most preferred product at the time of purchase; this unsatisfied demand is often substituted with an alternative. In the extant literature, there have been an increasing number of studies that consider product substitution when planning product assortment, inventory, and capacity, in conjunction with pricing. In this paper we classify the literature on the planning of substitutable products published in the major OM and marketing journals during the past thirty years (1974–2013) and present a comprehensive taxonomy of the literature. One criterion is adopted to discuss modeling objectives, and three major criteria are provided to define the nature of product substitution, including substitution mechanism, substitution decision maker, and direction of substitutability. We also identify research gaps to provide guidance for related research in the future.

Keywords: Inventory; Product substitution; Choice model; Assortment decision; Pricing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221715002854
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:246:y:2015:i:3:p:686-699

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.04.013

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().