Priori forecasting, Corporate Finance

Assignment Help:

Chang and Fyffe (1971) assume that a ?rm has a ''long-run sales history of individual seasonal-style-goods SKUs or groups of such SKUs''. They propose to estimate demand by using regression on those historic sales, also based on the ''outcome of some observable variable''. However, they do not explain in detail how that can be done nor do they test the method using real data. It seems dif?cult to apply this method in the apparel industry, as long-run sales histories of very similar products are rare.

Chambers and Eglese (1988) discuss the use of preview demand data that are gathered by sending out a preview catalogue (whichdoes not necessarily include a full product range) to a sample comprised of several thousand regular customers and offering themthe opportunity to order products at a discount before the season starts. They assume that an aggregate forecast for the full product range is given, and propose to forecast the demand for a product line by multiplying the aggregate forecast with the fraction of total preview demand for products in that product line. They further propose a second, slightly more sophisticated forecasting method,which takes into account that the ratio of total demand to preview demand ('the scaling factor') may not be the same for all  product lines. These methods are very suitable and, indeed, have been developed for an apparel mail order company.

Thomassey and Happiette (2007) propose a decision-support system based on neural networks, which automatically performs item sales forecasting. The system is designed to deal with many characteristics of the apparel market: large number of items, short lifetimes, substitution of most items with each new collection, long lead times, and in?uence of many external factors like the weather,promotions, fashion, and the economic environment. The proposed system is composed of three steps: obtain prototypes of demand behavior using a clustering procedure on historical demand data, (2) link these prototypes to descriptive criteria (e.g. price, lifespan or materials) using a probabilistic neural network, and (3) assign each new item to a prototype based on the item's descriptive criteria. Forecasts generated by the proposed model on a set of 285 new items from a French apparel distributor have a MAPE of 147%. So, accuracy is low despite the complexity of the method. For this reason, we decided not to include this method in our comparative study. The results in Section 5 will show that the simpler methods that we do consider are all more accurate (for our data set).


Related Discussions:- Priori forecasting

WACC, The total book value of WTC’s equity is $40 million and book value pe...

The total book value of WTC’s equity is $40 million and book value per share outstanding is $12. The stock of WTC is currently selling for a price of $35 per share and the beta of

Capital Structure, A leveraged recap, in which Midco would issue debt and u...

A leveraged recap, in which Midco would issue debt and use the proceeds to repurchase shares. A Midco industry has 20 million shares outstanding with market price of $15 per share

Growthg and assets, a firm wishes to maintain an internal growth rate of 6....

a firm wishes to maintain an internal growth rate of 6.5% and the dividend payout ratio of 25%. The current profit margin is 6%, and the firm uses no external financing sources. Wh

Indifference point., why debt and preferred stock do not meet each other wh...

why debt and preferred stock do not meet each other while in determining indifference point...

Maturity of Bond, Cavo Corp. has 9 percent coupon bonds making annual payme...

Cavo Corp. has 9 percent coupon bonds making annual payments with a YTM of 8.3 percent. The current yield on these bonds is 8.65 percent. How many years do these bonds have left

Compute the expected return, You have ten million dollars to allocate acros...

You have ten million dollars to allocate across two projects, code named 'Wombat' and 'Marmot.' Both projects are somewhat scalable, in that you could potentially invest as much (u

Mmtheory, the departure from Modigliani-Miller proposition using the agency...

the departure from Modigliani-Miller proposition using the agency cost and information asymmetry theory of capital structure

Agency conflic, how would the concept of economic value added reduce the pr...

how would the concept of economic value added reduce the problem of agency conflict

Write Your Message!

Captcha
Free Assignment Quote

Assured A++ Grade

Get guaranteed satisfaction & time on delivery in every assignment order you paid with us! We ensure premium quality solution document along with free turntin report!

All rights reserved! Copyrights ©2019-2020 ExpertsMind IT Educational Pvt Ltd