Assortment Optimization Under the Multinomial Logit Model with Utility-Based Rank Cutoffs PDF Download
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Author: Jacob Feldman
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Languages : en
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We study assortment optimization problems under a natural variant of the multinomial logit model where the customers are willing to focus only on a certain number of products that provide the largest utilities. In particular, each customer has a rank cutoff, characterizing the number of products that she will focus on during the course of her choice process. Given that we offer a certain assortment of products, the choice process of a customer with rank cutoff k proceeds as follows. The customer associates random utilities with all of the products as well as the no-purchase option. She ignores all alternatives whose utilities are not within the k largest utilities. Among the remaining alternatives, the customer chooses the available alternative that provides the largest utility. Under the assumption that the~utilities follow Gumbel distributions with the same scale parameter, we provide a recursion to compute the choice probabilities. Considering the assortment optimization problem to find the revenue-maximizing assortment of products to offer, we show that the problem is NP-hard and give a polynomial-time approximation scheme. Since the customers ignore the products below their rank cutoffs in our variant of the multinomial logit model, intuitively speaking, our variant captures choosier choice behavior than the standard multinomial logit model. Accordingly, we show that the revenue-maximizing assortment under our variant includes the revenue-maximizing assortment under the standard multinomial logit model, so choosier behavior leads to larger assortments offered to maximize the expected revenue. We conduct computational experiments on both synthetic and real datasets to demonstrate that incorporating rank cutoffs can yield better predictions of customer choices and yield more profitable assortment recommendations.
Author: Jacob Feldman
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Languages : en
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Book Description
We study assortment optimization problems under a natural variant of the multinomial logit model where the customers are willing to focus only on a certain number of products that provide the largest utilities. In particular, each customer has a rank cutoff, characterizing the number of products that she will focus on during the course of her choice process. Given that we offer a certain assortment of products, the choice process of a customer with rank cutoff k proceeds as follows. The customer associates random utilities with all of the products as well as the no-purchase option. She ignores all alternatives whose utilities are not within the k largest utilities. Among the remaining alternatives, the customer chooses the available alternative that provides the largest utility. Under the assumption that the~utilities follow Gumbel distributions with the same scale parameter, we provide a recursion to compute the choice probabilities. Considering the assortment optimization problem to find the revenue-maximizing assortment of products to offer, we show that the problem is NP-hard and give a polynomial-time approximation scheme. Since the customers ignore the products below their rank cutoffs in our variant of the multinomial logit model, intuitively speaking, our variant captures choosier choice behavior than the standard multinomial logit model. Accordingly, we show that the revenue-maximizing assortment under our variant includes the revenue-maximizing assortment under the standard multinomial logit model, so choosier behavior leads to larger assortments offered to maximize the expected revenue. We conduct computational experiments on both synthetic and real datasets to demonstrate that incorporating rank cutoffs can yield better predictions of customer choices and yield more profitable assortment recommendations.
Author: Ruxian Wang
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Languages : en
Pages : 7
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We consider an assortment and price optimization problem where a retailer chooses an assortment of competing products and determines their prices to maximize the total expected profit subject to a capacity constraint. Customers' purchase behavior follows the multinomial logit choice model with general utility functions. This paper simplifies it to a problem of finding a unique fixed point of a single-dimensional function and visualizes the assortment optimization process. An efficient algorithm to find the optimal assortment and prices is provided.
Author: Yicheng Bai
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Languages : en
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Motivated by empirical evidence that the utility of each product depends on the assortment of products offered along with it, we propose an endogenous context-dependent multinomial logit model (Context-MNL) under which the utility of each product depends on both the product's intrinsic value and the deviation of the intrinsic value from the expected maximum utility among all the products in the offered assortment. Under the Context-MNL model, an assortment provides a context in which customers evaluate the utility of each product. Our model generalizes the standard multinomial logit model and allows the utility of each product to depend on the offered assortment. The model is parsimonious, requires only one parameter more than the standard multinomial logit model, captures the assortment-dependent effect endogenously, and does~not require the decision-maker to determine in advance the relevant attributes of the assortment that might affect the product utility. The Context-MNL model also admits tractable maximum likelihood estimation and is operationally tractable, with efficient solution methods for solving assortment and price optimization problems. Our numerical study, which is based on data from Expedia, shows that compared to the standard multinomial logit model, the Context-MNL model substantially improves out-of-sample goodness of fit and prediction accuracy.
Author: Antoine Désir
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Languages : en
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Assortment optimization is an important problem that arises in many practical applications such as retailing and online advertising. In this problem, the goal is to select a subset of items that maximizes the expected revenue in the presence of (1) the substitution behavior of consumers specified by a choice model, and (2) a potential capacity constraint bounding the total weight of items in the assortment. The latter is a natural constraint arising in many applications. We begin by showing how challenging these two aspects are from an optimization perspective. First, we show that adding a general capacity constraint makes the problem NP-hard even for the simplest choice model, namely the multinomial logit model. Second, we show that even the unconstrained assortment optimization for the mixture of multinomial logit model is hard to approximate within any reasonable factor when the number of mixtures is not constant.In view of these hardness results, we present near-optimal algorithms for the capacity constrained assort- ment optimization problem under a large class of parametric choice models including the mixture of multinomial logit, Markov chain, nested logit and d-level nested logit choice models. In fact, we develop near-optimal algorithms for a general class of capacity constrained optimization problems whose objective function depends on a small number of linear functions. For the mixture of multinomial logit model (resp. Markov chain model), the running time of our algorithm depends exponentially on the number of segments (resp. rank of the transition matrix). Therefore, we get efficient algorithms only for the case of constant number of segments (resp. constant rank). However, in light of our hardness result, any near-optimal algorithm will have a super polynomial dependence on the number of mixtures for the mixture of multinomial logit choice model.
Author: Sumit Kunnumkal
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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We consider the assortment optimization problem under the nested logit model and obtain new bounds on the gap between the optimal expected revenue and an upper bound based on a certain continuous relaxation of the assortment problem. Our bounds can be tighter than the existing bounds in the literature and provide more insight into the key drivers of tractability for the assortment optimization problem under the nested logit model. Moreover, our bounds scale with the nest dissimilarity parameters and we recover the well-known tractability results for the assortment optimization problem under the multinomial logit model when all the nest dissimilarity parameters are equal to one. We extend our results to the cardinality constrained assortment problem where there are constraints that limit the number of products that can be offered within each nest.
Author: Ruxian Wang
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Languages : en
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This paper incorporates heterogeneous threshold effects into the classical multinomial logit (MNL) model, and studies the associated operations problems such as estimation and assortment optimization. The derived model is referred to as the threshold multinomial logit (TMNL) model and incorporates the recently proposed threshold Luce (T-Luce) model as a limiting case. Under the TMNL model, consumers first form their (heterogeneous) consideration set: If an alternative with significantly low utility is dominated by another one, it will not be included in the consideration set. The TMNL model can alleviate the restricted substitution patterns of MNL due to the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) property, and therefore can model more flexible choice behavior. We develop a maximum likelihood based estimation to calibrate the proposed threshold model and further establish its statistical properties such as consistency and asymptotic normality under mild conditions. An efficient EM algorithm is also developed to handle the scenario with incomplete sales data. Our extensive numerical studies on synthetic and real datasets show that the new model can improve the goodness of fit and prediction accuracy of consumer choice behavior. In addition, we characterize the optimal strategies and provide efficient solutions for the associated assortment optimization problems under the TMNL model. Our theoretical and empirical results suggest that the threshold effects should be taken into account in firms' decision making such as demand estimation and operations management, and ignoring these effects could lead to sub-optimal solutions or even substantial losses for firms.
Author: Guillermo Gallego
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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We address two important concerns faced by assortment managers, namely constrained assortment optimization and assortment personalization. We contribute to addressing these concerns by developing bounds and heuristics based on auxiliary multinomial logit (MNL) models. More precisely, we first provide easily computable upper and lower bounds for the unconstrained assortment optimization problem (TAOP) for every regular choice model and then extend the bounds to important versions of the constrained problem. We next provide an upper bound on the expected revenue of a clairvoyant firm that offers to each consumer the most profitable product that she is willing to buy. We then use the upper bound to assess the maximum benefits of personalization relative to a firm that does not personalize assortments. The standard prophet inequality is then used to show that the ratio is at most 2 for discrete choice models with { em independent} value gaps. For random utility models with dependent value gaps the ratio can be as large as the number of products. We find sufficient conditions to show that the prophet inequality holds for the $ alpha$-shaken multinomial logit ($ alpha$-MNL), a generalization of the MNL introduced here, that has the MNL and the generalized attraction model (GAM) as special cases. The prophet inequality also holds for the some versions of the Nested Logit model. For the latent-class MNL, the ratio is at most 1.5 when the coefficient of variation of the utilities goes to infinity. We show that consumers do not necessarily suffer under a clairvoyant firm and in fact their surplus may improve. On the other hand, when the clairvoyant firm has pricing power it can extract all of the consumers' surplus. We show that for the MNL model the clairvoyant can make up to $e$ times more than its non-clairvoyant counterpart.
Author: Ningyuan Chen
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Languages : en
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This paper presents the multinomial logit model with repeated customer interactions. In each period, the same customer selects a product from the assortment recommended in that period or opts out. It captures the essence of an increasingly popular business model called the subscription box, exemplified by Stitch Fix and Wantable. From the seller's perspective, the choice probability is updated based on the purchase history. We study the adaptive assortment recommendation strategy for all the periods. Although the problem is generally NP-hard as we show, when the customer interacts with the seller for two periods, we discover the structures of the optimal assortment when the available products in the two periods are identical and develop approximation algorithms in other cases. For more than two periods, although the optimal assortments are intractable, we find that the optimal fixed assortments that are not adapted to the purchase history can achieve 68.47% or 50% of the optimal expected revenue, respectively, when the available products across periods are disjoint or not. Using two public datasets, we demonstrate that the model with repeated customer interactions can better predict the purchase behavior and generates higher revenues.
Author: Zhen Chen
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Languages : en
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Assortment optimization is a fundamental problem in revenue management, in which the objective usually is to select a subset of products to offer to customers in order to maximize expected revenue or profit. However, business practices often involve multiple, and potentially conflicting goals. In this work, we propose a general framework and a novel reformulation method for solving multi-objective assortment optimization problems. Specifically, we consider problems with a separable sum of multiple convex objective functions on linear combinations of choice probabilities, and we present a reformulation that effectively "linearizes" the problem. We prove that the reformulated problem is equivalent to the original problem and that it leads to a unified solution approach to multi-objective assortment optimization problems in various contexts. We show that the approach encompasses a wide range of operational objectives, such as risk, customer utility, market share, costs with economies of scale, and dualized convex constraints. We first illustrate our approach with the multinomial logit model without any constraints or with allowance for totally unimodular constraints. We further show that our framework leads to tractable solutions under the nested logit model and the Markov chain choice model. Together with large-scale numerical experiments to demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of our methods, we highlight that our work provides a powerful and flexible tool for solving multi-objective assortment problems, which arise frequently in practical revenue management settings.
Author: Qingwei Jin
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Languages : en
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We study assortment optimization problems under multinomial logit choice model with two tree structured consideration set models, i.e., the subtree model and the induced paths model. In each model, there are multiple customer types and each customer type has a different consideration set. A customer of a particular type only purchases product within his consideration set. The tree structure means all products form a tree with each node representing one product and all consideration sets are induced from this tree. In the subtree model, each consideration set consists of products in a subtree and in the induced paths model, each consideration set consists of products on the path from one node to the root. All customers make purchase decisions following the same multinomial logit choice model except that different customer types have different consideration sets. The goal of the assortment optimization is to determine a set of products offered to customers such that the expected revenue is maximized. We consider both unconstrained problem and capacitated problem. We show that these problems are all NP-hard problems and propose a unified framework, which captures the tree structure in both models, to design fully polynomial time approximation schemes (FPTAS) for all these problems. Besides, we identify a special case under the induced paths model, showing that it can be solved in $O(n)$ operations.
