Posted by Herb Sorensen on January 10, 2002 at 17:20:16:
I have a paper by Farley and Ring on a model of supermarket traffic flow. They developed a stochastic model based on observation of paths and purchases of shoppers in four Pittsburgh stores, and found the model to be a reasonable predictor for a fifth Pittsburgh store.
They also applied the model to data from eleven Boston stores and found it predictive of Pittsburgh sales volumes. They comment, "It appears that the model is useful for analysis of hypothetical store layouts as well as analysis of existing stores."
This study was published in Operations Research, July-August 1966. My question is, does anyone know of more recent studies?