The books and papers this guide leans on, and what to take from each.
Measuring and Mitigating the Costs of StockoutsEric Anderson, Gavan Fitzsimons and Duncan Simester, Management Science, 2006The study behind part one. Read the section on the five scripts before you write your next out-of-stock email.
Direct from DellMichael Dell with Catherine Fredman, 1999The information-for-inventory idea in Dell’s own words, from the years when it was new.
Secret FormulaFrederick Allen, 1994A history of Coca-Cola that puts New Coke in context: what the company knew, what it assumed, and how fast it moved once it saw the reaction.
Reducing Assortment and The Effect of Product Assortment Changes on Customer RetentionBoatwright and Nunes, Journal of Marketing, 2001; Borle and colleagues, Marketing Science, 2005Read them as a pair: the same grocer, one reading by category and one by customer, and the gap between them is the lesson.
The Short- and Long-Term Impact of an Assortment Reduction on Category SalesLaurens Sloot, Dennis Fok and Peter Verhoef, Journal of Marketing Research, 2006Where the losses from a cut come from, and how new buyers partly make up for them.
Choice Overload: A Conceptual Review and Meta-AnalysisAlexander Chernev, Ulf Böckenholt and Joseph Goodman, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2015The four conditions under which too many options hurt, and so where curation pays.
Inside Steve’s BrainLeander Kahney, 2008On Jobs’s habit of cutting to a few products with clear roles. Read it next to Apple’s own 1998 filing, which is less romantic and more useful.
Full references for these and the rest of the research are in Appendix C.