ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on future research priorities in retail analysis and forecasting. Future research must pay more attention to the interrelationships of choice. One assumption that flows throughout the work is the concept of independence of choice; that is, that a person's choice of using retailer/product X is independent of his probability of using retailer/product Y. The market for retail analysis and forecasting techniques amongst the much larger number and wider range of fashion goods and service retailers is potentially much larger, and there is much less in-house provision. The retail modelling research which has been dominant so far in British academia has a serious limitation. Almost without exception it has concentrated on the grocery market. In the last ten years or so the use of modelling techniques to understand how the retail environment functions has increased apace. This has been contributed to by the information explosion, the advent of cheaper computer resources, and the availability of well-researched methods.
