Event Details

Management Science Seminar with Sarah Gelper

Abstract: We consider a retailer that has adopted a last-day-discount strategy for their fresh assortment: all fresh products are put on a uniform 15% discount rate one day before they expire. While this might help the retailer to reduce waste in the short run, it might also harm the retailer in the long run due the long-term negative effects of discounts. To assess this tension, we study the implications of the last-day-discount strategy for the retailer using a difference-in-difference approach on a one-year daily data set of 472 SKU’s across 6 stores. While we find strong short-term effects of last-day-discounts on sales, the long-term effects are small. These short-term effects confirm the notion that last-day-discounting can help reduce waste. The small long-term effects complement the branding literature – which provides strong evidence that frequent discounts deplete brands on the long run – by showing that brands are more resistant to such depletion for last-day-discounting in the fresh product category.

Bio: Sarah Gelper is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship and Marketing group of the TU/e. She holds a Masters degree in Economics and a PhD in Business Statistics, both from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. In 2010,she earned a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship from the European Union at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Sarah’s research focusses on quantitative marketing research. She studies the role of social interactions in the new product adoption process. Her research has been published in the marketing field (e.g. International Journal of Research in Marketing, Journal of Retailing) as well as in statistics journals (e.g. Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference).

She teaches Multivariate Statistics in the master program, and Marketing in Action in the New Product Development and Marketing bachelor USE-line.