Episode Details

English Podcast Starts at 00:00:00

Bengali Podcast Starts at 00:16:52

Hindi Podcast Starts at 00:32:14

German Podcast Starts at 00:45:18

Reference

Li, M. (2025). Newsvendors with Customer Referrals. Production and Operations Management, 35(1), 122-128. https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.13807

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Welcome to “Revise and Resubmit” 🎙️📚 — the show where dense academic PDFs turn into ideas you can actually use.

Today, we’re stepping into a world where inventory decisions and word-of-mouth marketing quietly shake hands behind the scenes. 🧠📦 Imagine you’re a retailer, standing in front of your stockroom door. You’re not just asking, “How much should I order?” — you’re also asking, “If my customers love this today… how many new customers will they bring me tomorrow?” 👀🛒

Our featured paper is titled
👉 “Newsvendors with Customer Referrals”
by Meng Li, published in the prestigious, FT50-listed journal Production and Operations Management, from SAGE Publications, online on 12 December 2025. 🌍✨

In classic newsvendor models, you choose inventory for a single period and hope you guessed right. But this paper does something smarter. It says: every unit you sell today is not just revenue — it’s a seed. 🌱 Because when customers talk, demand in the next period grows with your previous sales. Suddenly, inventory is no longer just a safety buffer against uncertainty; it becomes a growth engine for tomorrow’s customers. 🚀

Meng Li builds a two-period analytical model where referrals link today’s sales to tomorrow’s demand, and the result is powerful:

• Firms should often stock more initially than traditional models recommend.

• Referral programs are especially valuable for nonperishable products, where leftover inventory can roll forward and feed that new referral-driven demand.

• The paper shows how a basestock policy can elegantly weave together social customer acquisition and operations decisions into one coherent framework. 🔗📈

So the humble question, “How many units should I order?” becomes a deeper, sharper one:
💡 “How much am I willing to invest in future word-of-mouth today?”

As we unpack this paper, we’ll ask: if your warehouse could talk, what would it tell you about your referral strategy, your risk appetite, and your hidden growth potential? And in your own research or practice, are you still treating inventory as a cost… when it might actually be marketing in disguise? 🤯

A huge thank you to Meng Li and to SAGE Publications, and to the prestigious FT50 journal Production and Operations Management, for making this research possible and accessible. 🙏📖

If you enjoy diving into ideas like this, don’t forget to subscribe to
🎧 “Revise and Resubmit” on Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Apple Podcast,
and check out our 🎥 YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher” for more deep dives into cutting-edge papers.

So as you listen today, here’s the question I want to leave you with:
🤔 If every extra unit you stocked today could bring you an extra customer tomorrow, how radically would that change the way you manage your operations—and t