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INFORMS Analytics collection

Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, Felipe Caro, and Pierre Poignant serve as the editors of a new INFORMS Analytics collection on the topic of Innovation in Retail. This collection contains relevant multimedia sources showcasing recent innovations in the retail space. Besides numerous journal articles, the collection provides links to academic materials such as case studies or documentary videos, among others.
Visit the collection here:
https://pubsonline.informs.org/informs-analytics-collections/innovation-in-retail

Recap of the Latest Annual Meeting

European Lifetime Award in Retail Operations

The first European Lifetime Award in Retail Operations was awarded to Karel van Donselaar (TU Eindhoven) during the opening dinner of the workshop on September 18. The award and laudation were presented by Professor Jan Fransoo (Tilburg University) on behalf of the jury that further consisted of Professor Alexander Hübner (TU München) and Professor Pedro Amorim (University of Porto).
Karel’s contributions have been in the domain of grocery retail operations since 1998 where he builds on his extensive prior research experience in inventory control and forecasting. In a recent 2023 paper, all relevant lost sales inventory policies over time were implemented, finding that Karel’s policy, 25 years later, still outperforms all other policies. The techniques Karel developed also have been widely adopted in the many industry projects he conducted.
The research article of Karel and his co-authors that created the most significant academic impact is his 2010 paper in Management Science. The article demonstrates the added value that store managers can have over and above an automated store ordering system. Just in 2023, five of the published papers in Management Science cite this work—13 years after its original publication date!
Karel also has had a great impact on his students throughout his career, where he introduced more than 1,250 graduate students to the exciting world of retail operations and supervised more than 140 master theses. In this way, many of the research insights and tooling that he and his research collaborators developed have found their way to industry applications, improving the competitiveness of retailers, enhancing customer experience, and reducing the environmental impact. Among others, he received the 2023 Best Master Teacher Award of the TU Eindhoven from a student jury.

Retail Operations Doctoral Dissertation Prize
The Doctoral Dissertation Award has been awarded to both Rafael Escamilla (now: W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University) and Christoph Baldauf (now: Center for Retailing, Stockholm School of Economics) for their theses on grocery retail operations in emerging markets and the relevance of logistics in online and omnichannel retail, respectively. 

The award has been handed out at the ceremony closing this year’s workshop on September 20 and the jury consisted of Sandra Transchel (KLU), Laura Wagner (IESE), and Robert Rooderkerk (RSM).

Best Poster and Plenary Presentations
Conference participants were asked to cast their vote for their favorite poster presentation and plenary presentation. The award for the best poster presentation was given to S. Iman Moosavi and his research on “Behavioral Considerations of Automation.” The best plenary presentation award was given to Christoph Baldauf and the work he presented on “The Impact of Buy Now, Pay Later on Customer Sales and Returns in Online Retail.”

Best Poster Award at EWG Retail Operations
And the winner is ... S. Iman Moosavi from Tilburg University
Pedro Amorim and Alexander Hübner are thrilled to announce the recipients of this year’s Best Poster Award in Retail Operations. He has been selected by online voting from all participants of the EWG Retail Operations of the EURO - The Association of European Operational Research Societies. Your innovative work and dedication truly stood out, and it’s fantastic to see your efforts on human-algorithm interactions are recognized by the retail community!
In his joint work with Jan Fransoo and Eirini Spiliotopoulou (Tilburg University on "Behavioral considerations of automation", Iman studied how automating a retail inventory planning task with algorithms leads to changes in the behavior of human demand forecasters who provide demand information for the planning task. This behavioral change occurs to such an extent that the overall performance of the process does not improve.
His findings highlight that when deploying algorithms in decision-making tasks, managers should consider not only the improvements within the specific task for which the algorithm is implemented, but also the behavior of human decision-makers in other parts of the organization who are responsible for related tasks.

Congratulations to this year’s awards winners!
We are already now looking forward to the 2025 Annual Meeting hosted by Victor Martínez de Albéniz and team—somewhere in Spain. Note that the next annual meeting will be in connection with the second version of the Ph.D. Summer School on Retail Operations. More information will follow throughout the year!