Research
Topics: Sustainable Operations, Retail Operations, Behavioral Operations Management, Operations-Marketing Interface.
Methods: Randomized Controlled Trials, Applied Econometrics and Causal Inference, Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis, Game Theory.
Publications
Abdulla, H., Abbey, J.D., Atalay, A.S., Meloy, M.G. Show, don't tell: Education and physical exposure effects in remanufactured product markets. Journal of Operations Management. 2024, 70(2).
Special Issue on Closed Loop Supply Chains with Product Remanufacturing: Challenges and Opportunities.
We study the effectiveness of two theoretically and practically relevant interventions designed to increase familiarity with and thereby stimulate the appeal of and willingness to pay (WTP) for remanufactured (refurbished) consumer products that are often found repulsive by consumers: 1) educating consumers about the remanufacturing process, 2) providing physical exposure to remanufactured products. We find that education does not cause an increase in the appeal of and WTP for remanufactured consumer products. Providing physical exposure to remanufactured products, relative to text and text-plus picture or video modalities, significantly increases both the appeal and WTP as a result of increasing perceived quality and decreasing disgust. Sellers can benefit from marketing remanufactured consumer products through physical channels (i.e., brick-and-mortar, outlet, showroom stores) as opposed to solely through online channels, which is the common practice among many sellers.
Oh, H.K., Abdulla, H., Oliva, R. Behavioral multi-lever decision-making: A study of consumer return policy, price, and inventory decisions. Journal of Operations Management. 2024, 70(1).
Consumer return policies have been long recognized and studied by operations management scholars as an important managerial lever in a retail environment. Yet, the behavioral aspects of return policy decision-making and interaction of return policy decisions with other common operational decisions have not been investigated to date. We present a behavioral analysis of return policy decision-making in a retail environment with aggregate demand and individual product valuation uncertainties. Leveraging a generalized newsvendor context, we conduct a randomized behavioral experiment to understand how individuals make each of the three key retail decisions-refund amount, price, and order quantity-and the causal effect of salvage value on these decisions. We find that decision-makers exhibit behavioral regularities in making decisions across the three levers and they react to changes in the operating conditions in a boundedly rational manner, suggesting the use of heuristics. Based on behavioral regularities that we observe in our data, i.e., responses, time-dependent effects, and decision dependencies, we develop a process theory based on behavioral decision-making tenets that offers a new direction with testable hypotheses for future research. The process theory describes a conditional decision-making heuristic that leads to a propagation of decision errors across different levers as well as lever-specific decision biases.
Abdulla, H., Abbey, J.D., Ketzenberg, M. How consumers value retailer's return policy leniency levers: An empirical investigation. Production and Operations Management. 2022, 31(4).
Oliva, R., Abdulla, H., Gonçalves, P. Do managers overreact when in backlog? Evidence of scope neglect from a supply chain experiment. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. 2022, 24(4).
Included into MSOM Virtual Special Issue: The Impact of Operations in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Abdulla, H., Ketzenberg, M., Abbey, J.D. Taking stock of consumer returns: A review and classification of the literature. Journal of Operations Management. 2019, 65(6).
Received Honorable Mention at JOM 2020 Jack Meredith Best Paper Award
Working Papers
Huseyn Abdulla, Seulchan Lee, Han Kyul Oh. Managing carbon neutral delivery in online retailing.
Huseyn Abdulla, Paolo Letizia, Gilvan Souza. Order cancellation behavior in online retailing: An empirical investigation.
Huseyn Abdulla, James D. Abbey, Michael Ketzenberg, Gregory R. Heim. The point of no return? Restrictive changes to long-established lenient return policies and consumer reactions to them.