For our last Research Seminar Lecture of this semester, we had the pleasure of welcoming Prof. Jura Liaukonyte from Cornell University.

She presented her work about patterns in brick-and-mortar and online grocery shopping. Using data from around one million shopping trips, she and her co-authors were able to, first, use machine learning to specify a regular shopping trip for each household in the data, and, second, to compare the variety and composition of different shopping baskets.

They found that customers make purchases in less product categories during their online (vs. offline) shopping trips, and that online grocery shopping baskets typically have fewer fresh vegetables and fewer “impulse purchase” products. What is more, Jura showed us that within a given household, the online grocery baskets are significantly more similar to each other than offline baskets, which is potentially driven by a past-orders shortcut.

During the doctoral seminar, Jura shared a lot of useful insights about how to come up with a research problem, and the entrepreneurial side of the research process.

Thank you for coming and being a wonderful last guest of the semester, Jura!