Retailers take up an extremely important position in the supply chain as they are the final business that links manufacturers to end-consumers. Retailing is where supply meets consumers’ needs, wants and whims in the most literal way. Therefore, dealing with retailing as just another link in the supply chain is an oversimplification.
This course addresses strategic and operations decisions with which retailers are confronted. Students will train their managerial and quantitative skills necessary to optimize these decisions. Throughout the course, we go beyond a sterile conceptualisation of demand and discuss in detail how a retailer’s decisions affect the end-consumer. Although most of the studied principles have wide applicability, our primary focus is on food and general merchandise retailers.

Roughly, the course is split up in two main parts: “Strategic Decisions” and “Operations Decisions”. The first part addresses decisions with a long-term impact on the retailer’s success whereas the second part deals with the more tactical operations activities. In the part on strategic decisions, we study, in particular, multichannel retailing and store location decisions. In the part on operations decisions, we cover, assortment and inventory decisions, shelf space management, and finally price setting and price promotion.

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Courses and workload are demanding for all IB Master courses. Exchange students need to have obtained a bachelor degree with a major in Business. This course can be considered as an advanced course in terms of literature. Knowledge of statistical concepts (such as mean, variance, covariance, but also regression analysis) and experience with Excel are required. Experience with some statistical package (e.g., SPSS) may come in useful too..
An advanced level of English