Experimental Designs for Multi-Item Multi-Period Inventory Control

Xinqi Chen, Xingyu Bai, Zeyu Zheng and Nian Si

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Randomized experiments, or A/B testing, are the gold standard for evaluating interventions, yet they remain underutilized in inventory management. This study addresses this gap by analyzing A/B testing strategies in multi-item, multi-period inventory systems with lost sales and capacity constraints. We examine two canonical experimental designs--switchback experiments and item-level randomization--and show that both suffer from systematic bias due to interference: temporal carryover in switchbacks and cannibalization across items under capacity constraints. Under mild conditions, we characterize the direction of this bias in different scenarios. Motivated by two-sided randomization, we propose a pairwise design over items and time and analyze its bias properties. Controlled stochastic simulations verify the theoretical predictions, and trace-driven experiments on real-world fresh-retail data show that the same mechanisms persist in realistic environments with stockout substitution.

Date: 2025-01, Revised 2026-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11996 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2501.11996

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().