Retail inventory shrinkage, sensing weak security breach signals, and organizational structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Retail inventory shrinkage, resulting primarily from employee theft and shoplifting, costs retailers nearly $70 billion annually. With brick‐and‐mortar retailers today confronting increased competition and low future growth expectations, reducing inventory shrinkage is becoming even more critical to becoming profitable. This paper analyzes a unique dataset that combines both primary survey and objective archival data from a Fortune 500 retailer to test a theoretical model associating retail inventory shrinkage, the capacity of a retail store to sense weak security breach signals, centralization of decision making, and formalization of security breach management. The analysis builds on insights from high reliability organization theory and the literature on organizational structure. Results reveal that as a retail store increases its capacity to sense weak security breach signals, it observes decreases in store‐level inventory shrinkage, with this negative association amplified (dampened) when the retail store has formalized procedures and protocols for managing security breaches (has centralized decision making within the retail store). Moreover, while the establishment of formalized procedures and protocols for managing security breaches bolsters the capacity of a retail store to sense weak security breach signals, centralizing decision making has the opposite effect. Our findings contribute to the retail operations literature by introducing a new store‐level organizational capability to guard against theft‐based retail inventory shrinkage and by offering novel insights into how and why organizational structure at the level of a retail store deters or facilitates the capacity to sense weak security breach signals. From a practical perspective, these findings advise retailers to develop the capability to become aware of and to mitigate security breaches. Further, to support this capacity, retailers are urged to decentralize decision making to retail store personnel and to invest in formalizing procedures and protocols for managing security breaches in order to deter retail thefts that shrink retail store inventory.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".