Mehra, Amit
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10735.1/6676
Amit Mehra is Associate Professor of Information Systems. His research interests include:
- Technology-driven personalization in retailing and education
- Digital retailing
- Human capital development
- High-tech product and services development
- Software development and pricing
- Analytics
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Recent Submissions
Item Why Do Stores Drive Online Sales? Evidence of Underlying Mechanisms from a Multichannel Retailer(Institute for Operations Research.and the Management Sciences, 2019-03-05) Kumar, A.; Mehra, Amit; Kumar, S.; 0000-0002-3822-9543 (Mehra, A); Mehra, AmitWe utilize the event of store opening by a large apparel retailer and use customerlevel data to estimate the effect of store presence on the online purchase behavior of its existing customers. We find that the retailer's store openings resulted in an increase in online purchases fromsuch customers. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior and prospect theory, we propose two mechanisms to explain this complementary effect of store presence on online purchases by existing customers. These mechanisms are the store engagement effect- customers making higher online purchases because of higher engagement from store interactions-and the store return effect-reduced risk of online purchase because of the option of store returns. We provide direct empirical evidence of these mechanisms on customer-level data. We further show that these effects increase as customers' distances from the retailer's store reduce because of the store openings. Our findings have significant implications for multichannel retailers. ©2019, INFORMS.Item Competitive Strategies for Brick-and-Mortar Stores to Counter "Showrooming"(INFORMS) Mehra, Amit; Kumar, S.; Raju, J. S.; 0000-0002-3822-9543 (Mehra, A); 56292095 (Mehra, A); Mehra, AmitCustomers often evaluate products at brick-and-mortar stores to identify their "best-fit" product but buy it for a lower price at a competing online retailer. This freeriding behavior by customers is referred to as "showrooming," and we show that this is detrimental to the profits of the brick-and-mortar stores. We first analyze price matching as a short-term strategy to counter showrooming. Price matching allows customers to purchase a product from the store for less than the store's posted price, so one would expect the price matching strategy to be less effective as the fraction of customers who seek the matching increases. However, our results show that with an increase in the fraction of customers who seek price matching, the store's profits initially decrease and then increase. While price matching could be used even when customers do not exhibit showrooming behavior, we find that it is more effective when customers do showrooming. We then study exclusivity of product assortments as a long-term strategy to counter showrooming. This strategy can be implemented in two different ways: (1) by arranging for exclusivity of known brands (e.g., Macy's has such an arrangement with Tommy Hilfiger) or (2) through the creation of store brands at the brick-and-mortar store (T. J. Maxx sells a large number of store brands). Our analysis suggests that implementing exclusivity through store brands is better than exclusivity through known brands when the product category has few digital attributes. However, when customers do not showroom, the known-brand strategy dominates the store-brand strategy.