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Essays On Empirical Operations Management In Retail Sales And Service, Youran Fu

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

This dissertation studies empirical operational problems in retail sales and service systems through three essays. We are in the middle of a remarkable rise in data analytics as available data, as well as the capability of artificial intelligence grows exponentially. This dissertation demonstrates how we can use traditional econometrics and cutting-edge machine learning models to provide data analytics for retail operations management. The first essay studies the value of unstructured social media text data in forecasting future fashion demands several months out, at a granular style-color level. Using recent advancement in natural language processing and machine learning techniques, we show …