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Author: Qian Liu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
Opaque selling, in which a seller offers a menu of opaque products from a collection of physical products, has been shown to be an effective strategy to segment a market and improve the seller's profit. We study opaque selling with stochastic demand and fixed initial inventory, where we consider two scenarios. In the exogenous fulfillment scenario, the assignment of physical products to fulfill customer demand is based on pre-announced probabilities. In the endogenous fulfillment scenario, the assignment is dynamically determined by the seller. In both settings, the seller dynamically controls the offering of opaque products over time to maximize the total expected revenue. The existing literature has well studied the mechanism of opaque selling and its benefits over other selling strategies. However, much of the literature considers only a single opaque product. This paper contributes to the literature by considering multiple opaque products and focusing on the practice implementation of opaque selling. We formulate the seller's problem as a stochastic dynamic program. Due to the well-known curse of dimensionality, we study the fluid control problem and develop decomposition heuristic for both scenarios based on the corresponding fluid solution. We show that the fluid control problem can provide a time-based fluid policy that is asymptotically optimal. In particular, we show that adopting a stationary probabilistic fulfillment strategy for the endogenous fulfillment scenario is asymptotically optimal. The numerical study shows that offering multiple opaque products can substantially improve the seller's revenue under certain conditions. Our results provide guidance for sellers on how to implement the opaque selling practically when they have finite inventories of multiple substitutable products.
Author: Qian Liu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
Opaque selling, in which a seller offers a menu of opaque products from a collection of physical products, has been shown to be an effective strategy to segment a market and improve the seller's profit. We study opaque selling with stochastic demand and fixed initial inventory, where we consider two scenarios. In the exogenous fulfillment scenario, the assignment of physical products to fulfill customer demand is based on pre-announced probabilities. In the endogenous fulfillment scenario, the assignment is dynamically determined by the seller. In both settings, the seller dynamically controls the offering of opaque products over time to maximize the total expected revenue. The existing literature has well studied the mechanism of opaque selling and its benefits over other selling strategies. However, much of the literature considers only a single opaque product. This paper contributes to the literature by considering multiple opaque products and focusing on the practice implementation of opaque selling. We formulate the seller's problem as a stochastic dynamic program. Due to the well-known curse of dimensionality, we study the fluid control problem and develop decomposition heuristic for both scenarios based on the corresponding fluid solution. We show that the fluid control problem can provide a time-based fluid policy that is asymptotically optimal. In particular, we show that adopting a stationary probabilistic fulfillment strategy for the endogenous fulfillment scenario is asymptotically optimal. The numerical study shows that offering multiple opaque products can substantially improve the seller's revenue under certain conditions. Our results provide guidance for sellers on how to implement the opaque selling practically when they have finite inventories of multiple substitutable products.
Author: Guillermo Gallego
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
A pervasive problem for retailers is to make assortment and inventory procurement decisions of substitutable products with the goal of maximizing expected profits over a pre-defined selling horizon. Multiple inventory replenishments are not allowed. This problem is challenging because of demand substitution effects that are driven initially by the assortment decision and later by stockouts. We propose intuitive and easy-to-implement heuristic based on the sample average approximation method coupled with the Markov chain approximation to discrete choice modelling. We show that our heuristic is asymptotically optimal, and quite effective even in the non-asymptotic regime. Our heuristic exhibits very small optimality gaps and outperform, sometimes dramatically, traditional newsvendor solutions that ignore dynamic substitution effects. Our numerical analysis also reveals that the newsvendor heuristic may perform quite well when the assortment is properly chosen and demand variability is relatively low. These managerial insights help decide when to employ the traditional newsvendor solution. We also look into endogenous pricing and show that even a simple heuristic can significantly enhance profits if prices can be adjusted sufficiently often. Another finding is that price flexibility mitigates the need for safety stocks to the point that not hedging inventories is often better than hedging them.
Author: Sajjad Najafi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
I study the dynamic pricing problem of a firm selling limited inventory of multiple differentiated products over a finite planning horizon, where the firm wishes to maximize the expected revenue. I formulate the firm's optimization problem as a Markov decision process and investigate the pricing problem in the presence of a variety of operational settings. First, I integrate consumer's sequential search behavior into the pricing problem. The consumer inspects products one at a time by incurring non-zero search cost, and makes decision by comparing the utility of the best product so far versus the reservation utility, a threshold at which the consumer is indifferent between continuation and stopping of the sequential search. The firm aims at maximizing the expected revenue by offering the products in the right sequence and at the right prices. I analytically derive the optimal prices in each period. I show that under some condition it is optimal to present products in the descending order of quality. Second, I address a problem in which the firm is subject to a set of sales volume constraints required to be satisfied at different time points along the sales horizon. Due to stochastic nature of sales, I incorporate a risk measure that allows the firm to manage the total sales while the expected revenue is maximized. I formulate the problem as a chance-constrained dynamic programming and show that the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions are not only necessary but also sufficient for the optimal price. Third, I assimilate consumer's consideration sets to the dynamic pricing problem. When to make a purchase decision, consumers use a two-stage decision-making process, i.e., consumers constitute a consideration set including a subset of the available products using a screening rule (e.g., brands, quality, and budget), and they only evaluate the products in the consideration set using a utility comparison process and opt for the product with the maximum utility. I show that the first-order condition is sufficient for the optimal price of products if consumers apply a quality-based screening rule.
Author: Jing-Sheng Jeannette Song
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This paper studies dynamic inventory and pricing decisions for a set of substitutable products over a finite planning horizon with full backlogging. The objective is to maximize the total expected discounted profit. We present a general stochastic, price-dependent demand model that unifies many commonly used demand models in the literature. The original formulation is not jointly concave in the decision variables and is therefore intractable. One key observation is that the problem becomes jointly concave if we work with the inverse of the price vector -- the market share vector. With this variable transformation, we are able to characterize the optimal policy and develop algorithms to compute it. In each period, the optimal policy first identifies a set of the products that are overstocked and hence need no replenishment and then specifies the optimal order-up-to levels for under-stocked products and the optimal market shares (and prices) for all products, both of which are functions of the overstocking levels. We further establish conditions under which the optimal policy demonstrates certain monotonicity property that can greatly enhance computation. Finally, we develop several computationally efficient heuristic policies and numerically compare them and discuss the interplay of pricing and inventory decisions.
Author: Ying Cao (Ph. D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Advertising
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays which study assortment planning and inventory management of substitutable products motivated by different practical problems. Chapter 2 considers the assortment planning problem for a retailer who faces customers that buy multiple differentiated products (n-pack) on a store visit. We develop two choice models: the probabilistic choice rule which captures the heterogeneous consumer population choice pattern and maximum choice rule which captures the homogeneous consumer population choice pattern. We find that, under probabilistic choice rule, the optimal assortment is such that it includes a certain number of the most and least popular products. In contrast, under maximum choice rule, the optimal assortment does not have a fixed structure except that it is guaranteed to include the most popular product. We develop an algorithm under maximum choice rule which is shown to have good performance. In addition, we derive the structure of optimal assortment under both choice rules when a retailer ignores key features of n-pack choice model including choice premium and basket shopping behavior. We also conduct a numerical study where we show that ignoring these key features can lead to significant profit loss for a retailer. Chapter 3 explores the assortment planning for a firm who faces a two-sided market. That is, the firm receives revenues from two distinct user groups: the customers, who pay for the products it sells and the advertisers who pay to advertise their brand to the customers. We obtain structural properties of the optimal assortment. We also consider the case where the firm is allowed to offer multiple products with the same attractiveness profile and price. In this case, we obtain conditions under which the optimal assortment is made out of distinct products. In addition, we show that ignoring the revenue from the customers or the advertisers, or focusing only on one segment when making product assortment decisions can lead to a significant revenue loss; specifically, we derive the theoretical bound on revenue loss in these situations. Chapter 4 studies the decision making of an inventory manager who needs to decide order quantities of multiple substitutable products in his store. As such, the decision maker typically checks the sales history of the products. When there is stock-out, the sales history provides inaccurate information because the lost sales are unobservable and the sales from substitution are indistinguishable from first-choice sales, which we refer to as the "doublecensoring effect". To study the impact of substitution rate and information amount on decision maker's performance, we design an experiment where subjects need to decide inventory levels for 2 substitutable products in consecutive 30 periods. The experimental data shows that subjects underestimate the demand for high demand product and overestimate the demand for low demand product. Moreover, the bias is worse when there is substitution in fully censored information treatment. Also, when subjects are provided with less information, they tend to order larger quantity in early periods in order to learn demand.
Author: Oben Ceryan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 40
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Book Description
Firms that offer multiple products are often susceptible to periods of inventory mismatches where one product may face shortages while the other has excess inventories. In this paper, we study a joint implementation of price- and capacity-based substitution mechanisms to alleviate the level of such inventory disparities. We consider a firm producing substitutable products via a capacity portfolio consisting of both product dedicated and flexible resources and characterize the structure of the optimal production and pricing decisions. We then explore how changes in various problem parameters affect the optimal policy structure. We show that the availability of a flexible resource helps maintain stable price differences across products over time even though the price of each product may fluctuate over time. This result has favorable ramifications from a marketing standpoint as it suggests that even when a firm applies a dynamic pricing strategy, it may still establish consistent price positioning among multiple products if it can employ a flexible replenishment resource. We provide numerical examples for the price stabilization effect and discuss extensions of our results to a more general multiple product setting.
Author: Yi Liu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
My dissertation focuses on the interface between operations management and marketing. I develop parsimonious models to optimize a firm's supply-side decisions as responses to the consumer behavior decisions they inevitably induce. Given the fact that marketing demand is full of diversity, which ultimately implies heterogeneity in consumer demand, solving supply chain problems can provide significant value to both academia and industry. In my first research, I consider a firm that sells a product defined by both vertical and horizontal attributes to consumers characterized by heterogeneous preferences for the horizontal attribute. In that context, I explore the extent to which a given firm should be transparent versus opaque in describing its product's horizontal attribute. Accordingly, I establish the value of opaque selling by comparing the firm's optimal expected profit against the benchmark expected profit associated with full transparency. I find that opaqueness should increase as the quality level of the vertical attribute increases, such that full transparency is optimal only if the quality level is below a threshold that depends on the product's horizontal attribute. Moreover, I find that optimal opaque selling could yield a win-win in the sense that it could not only increase the firm's profits but also increase consumer surplus, depending on the product's specific attributes. In my second research, I consider the optimal product design question for a firm in a two-segment market characterized by heterogeneous consumer willingness to pay for the product's vertical attribute. The firm's product vertical attribute is currently limited by a technological capability that can be removed if product introduction is delayed by one time period. The question is, what, if any segment should be targeted now and what, if any, should be targeted later. Then I find the threshold of the technological capability and cannibalization for the firm to target each market segment and the time of product introduction.
Author: Adam N. Elmachtoub
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 42
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Book Description
An opaque product is a product where some secondary attribute is not revealed to the customer until after purchase. Selling opaque products has become popular on e-commerce platforms where the hidden attribute is often color or style, thanks to its obvious advantage in risk pooling the demand. The objective of this study is to quantify the value of consumer flexibility that underlies opaque selling. We consider a setting in which an online retailer sells N products that only differ in a certain secondary attribute, and in addition offers a k-opaque option where customers select k products from which the seller allocates one to the customer. We assume that the prices are exogenously set such that q fraction of the customers select the k-opaque option. We refer to the tuple (q,k) as the degree of opacity, where the flexibility of the system is increasing in both q and k. When q=0 or k=1, our setting reduces to traditional non-opaque selling with no flexibility, and when the degree of opacity is (1,N), this corresponds to a fully flexible scenario where every customer is willing to receive any product. We find that even with a minimal degree of opacity where q is very small and k=2, the seller can achieve significant cost savings which we quantify precisely. Remarkably, we find that the cost savings from this minimal degree of opacity is on the same order as the fully flexible case corresponding to (1,N). This finding has practical managerial implications, as achieving (1,N) is practically infeasible since it would require substantial incentives by the seller to materialize. Our proofs rely on analyzing a simple balancing policy to allocate products to opaque customers, and explores a novel connection to the balls-into-bins framework. As a byproduct of our analysis, we show that the simple balancing policy is asymptotically optimal. Finally, we provide numerical experiments that suggest our main insight, namely that a small degree of opacity provides advantages akin to a fully flexible system, holds under various extensions of our core setting.
Author: Serguei Netessine
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387980261
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
This important book is by top scholars in supply chain management, revenue management, and e-commerce, all of which are grounded in information technologies and consumer demand research. The book looks at new selling techniques designed to reach the consumer.
Author: Martin Schäfer
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961100306
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and differentiating it from related notions. After a chapter on the semantic analysis of complex nominals, it closes with a chapter on previous attempts to model semantic transparency. The second part introduces new empirical work on semantic transparency, introducing two different sets of statistical models for compound transparency. In particular, two semantic factors were explored: the semantic relations holding between compound constituents and the role of different readings of the constituents and the whole compound, operationalized in terms of meaning shifts and in terms of the distribution of specifc readings across constituent families. All semantic annotations used in the book are freely available.
