Assortment Planning with Nested Preferences

Assortment Planning with Nested Preferences PDF Author: Danny Segev
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The main contribution of this paper is to develop new techniques in approximate dynamic programming, along with the notions of rounded distributions and inventory filtering, to devise a quasi-PTAS for the capacitated assortment planning problem, originally studied by Goyal, Levi, and Segev (2009). Motivated by real-life applications, their nested preference lists model stands as one of very few settings, where near-optimal assortments and inventory levels can be computed efficiently. However, these findings crucially depend on certain distributional assumptions, leaving the general problem wide open in terms of approximability prior to this work. In addition to proposing the first rigorous approach for handling the nested preference lists model in its utmost generality, from a technical perspective, we augment the existing literature on dynamic programming with a number of promising ideas. These are novel algorithmic tools for efficiently keeping approximate distributions as part of the state description, while losing very little information and while accumulating only small approximation errors throughout the overall computation. From a conceptual perspective, at the cost of losing an eps-factor in optimality, we show how to dramatically improve on the truly exponential nature of standard dynamic programs, which seem essential for the purpose of computing optimal inventory levels.

Assortment Planning with Nested Preferences

Assortment Planning with Nested Preferences PDF Author: Danny Segev
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The main contribution of this paper is to develop new techniques in approximate dynamic programming, along with the notions of rounded distributions and inventory filtering, to devise a quasi-PTAS for the capacitated assortment planning problem, originally studied by Goyal, Levi, and Segev (2009). Motivated by real-life applications, their nested preference lists model stands as one of very few settings, where near-optimal assortments and inventory levels can be computed efficiently. However, these findings crucially depend on certain distributional assumptions, leaving the general problem wide open in terms of approximability prior to this work. In addition to proposing the first rigorous approach for handling the nested preference lists model in its utmost generality, from a technical perspective, we augment the existing literature on dynamic programming with a number of promising ideas. These are novel algorithmic tools for efficiently keeping approximate distributions as part of the state description, while losing very little information and while accumulating only small approximation errors throughout the overall computation. From a conceptual perspective, at the cost of losing an eps-factor in optimality, we show how to dramatically improve on the truly exponential nature of standard dynamic programs, which seem essential for the purpose of computing optimal inventory levels.

Revenue Management and Pricing Analytics

Revenue Management and Pricing Analytics PDF Author: Guillermo Gallego
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1493996061
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
“There is no strategic investment that has a higher return than investing in good pricing, and the text by Gallego and Topaloghu provides the best technical treatment of pricing strategy and tactics available.” Preston McAfee, the J. Stanley Johnson Professor, California Institute of Technology and Chief Economist and Corp VP, Microsoft. “The book by Gallego and Topaloglu provides a fresh, up-to-date and in depth treatment of revenue management and pricing. It fills an important gap as it covers not only traditional revenue management topics also new and important topics such as revenue management under customer choice as well as pricing under competition and online learning. The book can be used for different audiences that range from advanced undergraduate students to masters and PhD students. It provides an in-depth treatment covering recent state of the art topics in an interesting and innovative way. I highly recommend it." Professor Georgia Perakis, the William F. Pounds Professor of Operations Research and Operations Management at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This book is an important and timely addition to the pricing analytics literature by two authors who have made major contributions to the field. It covers traditional revenue management as well as assortment optimization and dynamic pricing. The comprehensive treatment of choice models in each application is particularly welcome. It is mathematically rigorous but accessible to students at the advanced undergraduate or graduate levels with a rich set of exercises at the end of each chapter. This book is highly recommended for Masters or PhD level courses on the topic and is a necessity for researchers with an interest in the field.” Robert L. Phillips, Director of Pricing Research at Amazon “At last, a serious and comprehensive treatment of modern revenue management and assortment optimization integrated with choice modeling. In this book, Gallego and Topaloglu provide the underlying model derivations together with a wide range of applications and examples; all of these facets will better equip students for handling real-world problems. For mathematically inclined researchers and practitioners, it will doubtless prove to be thought-provoking and an invaluable reference.” Richard Ratliff, Research Scientist at Sabre “This book, written by two of the leading researchers in the area, brings together in one place most of the recent research on revenue management and pricing analytics. New industries (ride sharing, cloud computing, restaurants) and new developments in the airline and hotel industries make this book very timely and relevant, and will serve as a critical reference for researchers.” Professor Kalyan Talluri, the Munjal Chair in Global Business and Operations, Imperial College, London, UK.

The Elements of Joint Learning and Optimization in Operations Management

The Elements of Joint Learning and Optimization in Operations Management PDF Author: Xi Chen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031019261
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This book examines recent developments in Operations Management, and focuses on four major application areas: dynamic pricing, assortment optimization, supply chain and inventory management, and healthcare operations. Data-driven optimization in which real-time input of data is being used to simultaneously learn the (true) underlying model of a system and optimize its performance, is becoming increasingly important in the last few years, especially with the rise of Big Data.

Greedy-Like Algorithms for Dynamic Assortment Planning Under Multinomial Logit Preferences

Greedy-Like Algorithms for Dynamic Assortment Planning Under Multinomial Logit Preferences PDF Author: Ali Aouad
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 58

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Book Description
We study the joint assortment planning and inventory management problem, where stock-out events elicit dynamic substitution effects, described by the Multinomial Logit (MNL) choice model. Special cases of this setting have extensively been studied in recent literature, notably the static assortment planning problem. Nevertheless, the general formulation is not known to admit efficient algorithms with analytical performance guarantees prior to this work, and most of its computational aspects are still wide open.In this paper, we devise the first provably-good approximation algorithm for dynamic assortment planning under the MNL model, attaining a constant-factor guarantee for a broad class of demand distributions, that satisfy the increasing failure rate property. Our algorithm relies on a combination of greedy procedures, where stocking decisions are restricted to specific classes of products and the objective function takes modified forms. We demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic methods in terms of performance and speed, leading to an average revenue gain of 4% to 12% in computational experiments. In the course of establishing our main result, we develop new algorithmic ideas that may be of independent interest. These include weaker notions of submodularity and monotonicity, shown sufficient to obtain constant-factor worst-case guarantees, despite using noisy estimates of the objective function.

The Approximability of Assortment Optimization Under Ranking Preferences

The Approximability of Assortment Optimization Under Ranking Preferences PDF Author: Ali Aouad
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description
The main contribution of this paper is to provide best-possible approximability bounds for assortment planning under a general choice model, where customer choices are modeled through an arbitrary distribution over ranked lists of their preferred products, subsuming most random utility choice models of interest. From a technical perspective, we show how to relate this optimization problem to the computational task of detecting large independent sets in graphs, allowing us to argue that general ranking preferences are extremely hard to approximate with respect to various problem parameters. These findings are complemented by a number of approximation algorithms that attain essentially best-possible factors, proving that our hardness results are tight up to lower-order terms. Surprisingly, our results imply that a simple and widely studied policy, known as revenue-ordered assortments, achieves the best possible performance guarantee with respect to the price parameters.

When Advertising Meets Assortment Planning

When Advertising Meets Assortment Planning PDF Author: Chenhao Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Although assortment optimization has been extensively studied, not much is known about how it is affected by advertising. In this paper, we address this gap by considering a novel joint advertising and assortment optimization problem. To capture the effect of advertising in the context of assortment planning, we assume that one can increase the preference weight of a product by advertising it, and the degree of improvement is decided by the effectiveness of advertising, which could be product-specific, and the amount of advertising efforts allocated to that product. Given budget constraints on advertising, our objective is to find a solution, which is composed of an advertising strategy and an assortment of products, that maximizes the expected revenue. We analyze the structural properties of this problem and derive effective solutions under different settings. If there is no capacity constraint on the number of products displayed to consumers, we show that revenue-ordered assortments still maintain optimality, and we leverage this result to derive an optimal solution. For the cardinality constrained case, it is difficult to solve the optimization problem directly; therefore, we show by relaxation that a near-optimal solution can be found efficiently.

Retail Supply Chain Management

Retail Supply Chain Management PDF Author: Narendra Agrawal
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1489975624
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
This new edition focuses on three crucial areas of retail supply chain management: (1) empirical studies of retail supply chain practices, (2) assortment and inventory planning and (3) integrating price optimization into retail supply chain decisions. The book has been fully updated, expanding on the distinguishing features of the original, while offering three new chapters on recent topics which reflect areas of great interest and relevance to the academic and professional communities alike - inventory management in the presence of data inaccuracies, retail workforce management, and fast fashion retail strategies. The innovations, lessons for practice, and new technological solutions for managing retail supply chains are important not just in retailing, but offer crucial insights and strategies for the ultimate effective management of supply chains in other industries as well. The retail industry has emerged as a fascinating choice for researchers in the field of supply chain management. It presents a vast array of stimulating challenges that have long provided the context of much of the research in the area of operations research and inventory management. However, in recent years, advances in computing capabilities and information technologies, hyper-competition in the retail industry, emergence of multiple retail formats and distribution channels, an ever increasing trend towards a globally dispersed retail network, and a better understanding of the importance of collaboration in the extended supply chain have led to a surge in academic research on topics in retail supply chain management. Many supply chain innovations (e.g., vendor managed inventory) were first conceived and successfully validated in this industry, and have since been adopted in others. Conversely, many retailers have been quick to adopt cutting edge practices that first originated in other industries. Retail Supply Chain Management: Quantitative Models and Empirical Studies, 2nd Ed. is an attempt to summarize the state of the art in this research, as well as offer a perspective on what new applications may lie ahead.

A Unified Analysis for Assortment Planning with Marginal Distributions

A Unified Analysis for Assortment Planning with Marginal Distributions PDF Author: Selin Ahipasaoglu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
We study assortment problems under the marginal distribution model (MDM), a semiparametric choice model that only requires marginal error information without assuming independence. It is known that the multinomial logit (MNL) model belongs to MDM. In this paper, we further show that some multi-purchase choice models, such as the multiple-discrete-choice (MDC) model, and threshold utility model (TUM), also fall into the framework of MDM, although MDM does not explicitly model multi-purchase behavior. For the assortment problem under MDM, we characterize a general condition for the marginal distributions under which a strictly profit-nested assortment is optimal. Moreover, though the problem is shown to be NP-hard, we prove that the best strictly profit-nested assortment is a 1/2-approximate solution for all MDMs. We further construct a simple case of MDM such that the 1/2-approximate bound is tight. These results either generalize or improve existing results on assortment optimization under MNL, MDC, and TUM.

An Exact Method for Assortment Optimization Under the Nested Logit Model

An Exact Method for Assortment Optimization Under the Nested Logit Model PDF Author: Laurent Alfandari
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 39

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Book Description
We study the problem of finding an optimal assortment of products maximizing the expected revenue, in which customer preferences are modeled using a Nested Logit choice model. This problem is known to be polynomially solvable in a specific case and NP-hard otherwise, with only approximation algorithms existing in the literature. For the NP-hard cases, we provide a general exact method that embeds a tailored Branch-and-Bound algorithm into a fractional programming framework. Contrary to the existing literature, in which assumptions are imposed on either the structure of nests or the combination and characteristics of products, no assumptions on the input data are imposed, and hence our approach can solve the most general problem setting. We show that the parameterized subproblem of the fractional programming scheme, which is a binary highly non-linear optimization problem, is decomposable by nests, which is a main advantage of the approach. To solve the subproblem for each nest, we propose a two-stage approach. In the first stage, we identify those products that are undoubtedly beneficial to offer, or not, which can significantly reduce the problem size. In the second stage, we design a tailored Branch-and-Bound algorithm with problem-specific upper bounds. Numerical results show that the approach is able to solve assortment instances with up to 5,000 products per nest. The most challenging instances for our approach are those in which the dissimilarity parameters of nests can be either less or greater than one.

Assortment Planning and Inventory Decisions Under a Locational Choice Model

Assortment Planning and Inventory Decisions Under a Locational Choice Model PDF Author: Vishal Gaur
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
We consider a single-period assortment planning and inventory management problem for aretailer, using a locational choice model to represent consumer demand. We first determinethe optimal variety, product location, and inventory decisions under static substitution, andshow that the optimal assortment consists of products equally spaced out such that there is nosubstitution among them regardless of the distribution of consumer preferences. The optimalsolution can be such that some customers prefer not to buy any product in the assortment, andsuch that the most popular product is not offered.We then obtain bounds on profit when customers dynamically substitute, using the staticsubstitution for the lower bound, and a retailer-controlled substitution for the upper bound.We thus define two heuristics to solve the problem under dynamic substitution, and numericallyevaluate their performance. This analysis shows the value of modeling dynamic substitution andidentifies conditions in which the static substitution solution serves as a good approximation.