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
Order-delivery related emissions constitute the vast majority of the environmental footprint of online retailers. A growing segment of consumers has become concerned with these emissions, discouraging them from shopping online. To alleviate these concerns, many online retailers consider committing to carbon-neutrality in the order delivery domain and partnering with Sustainability as a Service (SaaS) providers to offer a voluntary green shipping option to eco-conscious consumers to reduce the cost burden of offsetting the emissions. We examine an online retailer's decision to become carbon-neutral in the order delivery domain and offer a green shipping option to consumers by partnering with a SaaS provider. We develop a stylized game-theoretic model that considers eco-conscious and conventional consumers that are heterogeneous in terms of their distance from the retailer, product valuations, and environmental sensitivity. We characterize the conditions under which committing to carbon-neutrality in the order delivery domain is the profit maximizing strategy for the retailer, even without offering a consumer-paid green shipping option through a SaaS provider. We find that when offering a consumer-paid green shipping option through a SaaS provider, a preset offset payment model that quotes all consumers a fixed payment leads to a greater profit for the retailer than a calculated offset payment model, which quotes each consumer an individualized payment based on the emissions generated and market price of the offsets. We then show that a modified calculated payment model with a hybrid approach, allowing the retailer to set an offset payment and tie it to actual emissions, can further increase the retailer's profit under certain conditions.
Huseyn Abdulla, Paolo Letizia, Gilvan Souza. Order cancellation behavior in online retailing: An empirical investigation.
Order cancellations present substantial challenges for retailers, stemming from information distortions and inefficient allocation of fulfillment resources. Late cancellations—after the order is processed and dispatched for delivery—compound these challenges by necessitating product retrieval and return to the fulfillment center. Despite their lower costs compared to returns, understanding the drivers of cancellation behavior remains crucial for the development of effective strategies that manage cancellation rates without exacerbating return rates. Using a proprietary transactional data set and employing both econometric and quasi-experimental methods, we examine product- and ordering process-specific drivers of order cancellations and the causal impact of tightening order cancellation policies on cancellation and return rates. We find that orders placed using mobile devices are less likely to be canceled than orders placed through a personal computer (PC). Product customization is positively associated with cancellation rates, while opting for a faster order delivery mode is linked to lower cancellation rates. Moreover, we find that an order cancellation policy change that the retailer implemented in one of its geographical market areas—replacing the online self-service order cancellation process with a customer contact center-managed process, thus making order cancellations more onerous—resulted in a significant decrease in order cancellation rates, without concurrently increasing product return rates.
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.
Retailers face a challenging trade-off in maintaining versus restricting long-established lenient return policies. On the one hand, lenient return policies have become an important part of retailers’ value propositions and play a significant role in stimulating consumer purchases. On the other hand, lenient return policies increase volume of product returns, which hurts profitability. Motivated by observing an increase in restrictive changes to long-established lenient return policies, we investigate consumer reactions to such changes and their managerial implications. Through a series of experiments with diverse consumer samples, we find that restrictive changes, such as shortening return time windows or introducing restocking fees, decrease consumer trust in retailers and lead to lowered purchase, positive word-of-mouth, and loyalty intentions. We also find that providing managerial transparency, in the form of communicating the rationale for restrictive changes, can attenuate the negative consumer reactions to such changes. Moreover, rationales that emphasize cost of handling returns versus opportunistic and abusive returners are similarly effective. Our findings contribute to the growing academic literature on consumer return policy design and provide actionable insights to retail managers.