Director of the Luxembourg Center of Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Professor Benny Mantin, and Professor Nils Löhndorf, Chairholder of the Chair in Digital Procurement have recently published research in leading journals, POM and The European Journal of Operational Research.
“Pre‐Hurricane Consumer Stockpiling and Post‐Hurricane Product Availability: Empirical Evidence from Natural Experiments” co-authored by Professor Benny Mantin
Empty shelves would be one of the lasting memories of the early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic. As the virus spread, emergency measures have been imposed broadly and consumers have rushed to stockpile essential supplies. It is important to understand consumers’ habits in such emergency situations and assess how retailers cope and recover.
To study consumer precautionary stockpiling behaviour prior to the onset of emergency events and determine the impact of this behaviour on in‐store product availability for various formats of retail store outlets, Benny Mantin (LCL) and his colleagues (Xiaodan Pan, Concordia; Martin Dresner, UMD; and Jun Zhang, NOAA) focused on data available before and after hurricanes from the US. In their paper entitled “Pre‐Hurricane Consumer Stockpiling and Post‐Hurricane Product Availability: Empirical Evidence from Natural Experiments” they utilized retail scanner data from 60 US retail chains located in 963 counties to demonstrate that supply‐side characteristics (retail network and product variety), demand‐side characteristics (hurricane experience and household income), and disaster characteristics (hazard proximity and hazard intensity) significantly affect consumer stockpiling propensity hurricanes approach.
The increased consumer stockpiling has immediate and longer‐term impacts on retail operations, namely, in‐store product availability. Among various retail formats, drug stores are associated with the highest consumer stockpiling propensity before hurricanes, while dollar stores and discount stores are associated with the lowest in‐store product availability following hurricanes.
The paper, which was accepted for publication at POM—a leading FT ranked journal, is available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/poms.13230 (or at https://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10993/43982).
”Gas Storage Valuation in Incomplete Markets” co-authored by Professor Nils Löhndorf
Natural gas storage valuation is an important problem in energy trading, yet most valuation approaches are based on heuristics or ignore that gas markets are incomplete. Unlike financial markets, energy markets often lack liquidity and market players are more strongly regulated. Market incompleteness structurally changes the problem of storage valuation and asset-backed trading and the resulting model requires analysis of a combined control problem of storage operation and futures trading that takes risk preferences into account.
In their article, Prof Nils Löhndorf (LCL) and Prof David Wozabal (TU München) propose an exact valuation model for incomplete gas markets based on multistage stochastic programming. As the problem is subject to the curse of dimensionality, the authors outline a computational approach that is based on approximating the value function of the underlying high-dimensional dynamic program. They prove that the intrinsic value of storage corresponds to the value under perfect risk aversion and that the rolling intrinsic value – which is popular among practitioners and has been found to be near-optimal when markets are complete – is inconsistent in incomplete markets. The results inform managerial decisions on risk management and asset pricing for natural gasand highlight the importance of explicitly modeling risk preferences for pricing in incomplete markets.
This paper was accepted for publication at The European Journal of Operational Research, the world’s largest operations research journal and ranked by SJR in the top quartile for management science and operations research.