时间：2025年7月23日（周三）下午16:00-18:00

报告地点：主楼317

报告人：沈文静副教授，德雷塞尔大学

报告人简介：

Wenjing Shen （沈文静） is an Associate Professor of Operations Management. Her research focuses on the interfaces of marketing and operations management and supply chain management. She uses analytical models to demonstrate the importance of taking consumer reactions into consideration while making supply chain decisions. Her research has been published in Management Science, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, Omega among others. She currently serves as the editorial board member for Production and Operations Management, book review editor for INFORMS Journal of Applied Analytics, and associate editor for Omega.

报告内容简介：

The surge in product returns, particularly for seasonal products with short selling seasons, creates significant financial and environmental challenges as retailers often need to discard returned items at the end of the season. To address this issue, some retailers have tightened their return policies by shortening return windows or charging restocking fees, while others continue to offer lenient return policies to avoid reducing demand. In this study, we propose and evaluate a tiered refund policy that is combined with return restoration, where full refunds are offered for early returns and only partial refunds are offered for late returns, and the retailer can restore and resell items returned early. With a two-period model that captures consumer valuation uncertainty and the disutility of returning a product early, we characterize the retailer's optimal initial inventory level and restoration quantities and investigate the impact of the proposed policy on the retailer’s decision-making, profitability, and environmental outcomes. We find that optimal restoration provides better environmental outcomes in addition to improved profits compared to not restoring returned items. Moreover, retailers can also achieve a higher overall outcome that balances their financial and environmental objectives by switching from restoring all returned items to optimal restoration. Furthermore, we find that the proposed policy can also outperform two commonly adopted policies of shortening the return window and providing a full refund for all returns.

（承办：管理科学与物流系、科研与学术交流中心）