Research | Lu Jiaqi: Sourcing with Demand Updates

Release time：19 March 2026

Retail and fast-fashion companies always face a dilemma when ordering: order too early, and they lack confidence in market demand, leading to potential inventory losses; order later, and they receive more accurate market signals but must bear higher costs and shorter lead times. Traditional theoretical models cannot solve the practical problem of demand information updating over time and companies procuring in two stages. Professor Lu Jiaqi from the School of Management and Economics (SME) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen), together with Awi Federgruen from Columbia University and Liu Zhe from Imperial College London, co-authored the paper Sourcing with Demand Updates. This research targets this industry pain point by specifically studying how companies should formulate optimal two-stage ordering strategies based on dynamically changing market demand. It clearly informs companies when two-stage replenishment is more profitable and when a single order suffices, validating the practicality of this method with real retail data. Recently, this research was officially published in Management Science, a top-tier international management journal.