Co-authored Paper by Assistant Researcher Li Yue Published Online in Top International Management Journal Journal of Marketing Research

The co-authored paper Product Returns and Assortment Decisions: A Strategic Analysis of Online and Offline Competition by Assistant Researcher Li Yue from the School of Economics, Shandong University, Professor Raghunath Rao from the University of Texas at Austin, and independent researcher Paola Mallucci was published online in Journal of Marketing Research, a top international management journal, with Li Yue as the first author.

Previous retailer competition models mainly focus on retailers' pricing decisions while ignoring the more important issue—what products to sell. To fill this gap, this paper models and analyzes the competitive strategies of e-commerce and physical stores in product line selection and return management. The study finds that e-commerce tends to sell easy-to-fit products to reduce return costs, while physical stores may choose to sell harder-to-fit products, sacrificing sales volume to enhance the value of fitting rooms and attract customer traffic. This study also analyzes the online-offline cooperation model of "buy online and return in store" (BORS), and finds that this model increases physical store traffic and return volume in the short term, and expands the product categories sold by e-commerce and continuously brings traffic to physical stores in the long term. BORS can be sustained in the long run if the physical store is small or the cost of mailing returns is high.

Li Yue is an Assistant Researcher at Shandong University, with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has won honors such as the Best Conference Paper Award at the China Marketing International Conference and presided over projects such as the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province.

Original link:
https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437251314370