FAIRFAX, Va., June 3 -- George Mason University issued the following news release:
The billion-dollar Labubu phenomenon broke a cardinal rule of retail: Consumers need to know what they're buying before they open their wallet. Most new Labubu sales took the form of "blind boxes," where purchasers found out which type of doll they'd purchased only after the fact.
Zhechao Yang, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business at George Mason University, says that the "blind box" strategy, or "probabilistic selling" in academic terminology, is a rapidly growing global phenomenon that goes way beyond Labubu. Her recently published paper in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management ex...