3 research idea notes tagged “retail”. Read them as Markdown, JSON or an Atom feed.
Reverse logistics, return policies and product returns appear on 53 recent papers, almost all in operations research, with 15 in the last quarter against about 12 per quarter before. Online return rates are several times those of stores, and retailers are starting to charge for returns. Which policies cut returns without cutting sales, and what happens to the returned goods?
Papers in the last 30 days — return policy: 1 · reverse logistics: 3
Food waste reduction, perishable goods and perishable inventory appear on 69 recent papers, mostly in operations research, with the food waste problem studied separately in economics. Dynamic discounts, better forecasts and date labels all promise less waste. Which of them works at scale, and who captures the savings?
Papers in the last 30 days — food waste: 1
Demand and sales forecasting appear on 66 recent papers in the operations research and AI journals, but only 9 of them carry a language-model, foundation-model or text keyword. Retailers now feed product descriptions, reviews, weather and news into forecasting systems. Does text improve forecasts for new products, where history is missing, and does it help where history is long?
Papers in the last 30 days — demand forecasting: 10 · sales forecasting: 1
Scholar4AI. (2026). Research ideas tagged “retail”. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/tags/retail
@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-tags-retail,
author = {{Scholar4AI}},
title = {Research ideas tagged “retail”},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/tags/retail}},
urldate = {2026-10-23},
note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}