Download or read book Essays in Consumer Choice Driven Assortment Planning written by Denis R. Saure and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In particular, we study competition among retailers when they have access to common products, i.e., products that are available to the competition, and where consumers have full information about the retailers' offerings. Our results shed light on equilibrium properties in such settings and the effect common products have on this behavior.

Download or read book Essays on Assortment Planning with Consumer driven Substitution and Large scale Dynamic Programming written by Dorothée Honhon and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Handbook of Research on Strategic Retailing of Private Label Products in a Recovering Economy written by Gómez-Suárez, Mónica and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2016-06-20 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the global market continues to recuperate from economic downfall, it is essential for private label products to find ways to compete with alternatives offered by wholesale and national retailers. In many cases, it becomes difficult for off-brand products to generate market appeal when consumers have preconceived notions about the quality of generic products and loyalty to branded products. The Handbook of Research on Strategic Retailing of Private Label Products in a Recovering Economy emphasizes advertising and promotional approaches being utilized, as well as consumer behavior and satisfaction in response to marketing strategies and the sensitive pricing techniques being implemented to endorse generic and store-brand products available on the market. Highlighting brand competition between wholesalers, retailers, and private brand names following a global economic crisis, this publication is an extensive resource for researchers, graduate-students, economists, and business professionals.

Download or read book Optimizing Consumer centric Assortment Planning Under Cross selling Effects written by Ameera Ibrahim and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to modern-time, consumer-focused retailing is the ability to provide attractive and reasonably-priced product assortments for different customer profiles. To this end, retailers can benefit from the use of data analytics in order to identify distinct customer segments, each characterized by their buying power, shopping behavior, and preferences. Further, retailers can also benefit from a careful examination of alternative procurement options and cost levers associated with products that are considered for inclusion in the assortment. Issues of assortment planning lie at the interface of operations and marketing. Profitable planning trade-os can be identified using an optimization methodology and are simultaneously driven by consumer preferences and supply cost considerations. This dissertation proposes and investigates novel, integrated optimization models for assortment planning with the following overarching objectives: (i) To reveal insights into assortment decisions under product substitutability or complementarity and multiple customer segments; (ii) to improve the computational tractability of (nonlinear discrete) optimization models that arise in such contexts and to demonstrate their efficacy for large-scale data instances. In the first essay, we investigate the joint optimization of assortment and pricing decisions for complementary retail categories with relatively popular products having high and stable sales volumes, such as fast-moving consumer goods. Each category comprises substitutable items (e.g., different coffee brands) and the categories are related by cross-selling considerations that are empirically observed in marketing studies to be asymmetric in nature. That is, a subset of customers who purchase a product from a primary category (e.g., coffee) can typically opt to also buy from one or several complementary categories (e.g., sugar and/or coffee creamer). We propose a mixed-integer nonlinear program that maximizes the retailer's profit by jointly optimizing assortment and pricing decisions for multiple categories using a deterministic maximum-surplus consumer choice model. A linear mixed-integer reformulation is developed, which effectively enables an exact solution to large, industry-sized problem instances using commercial optimization solvers. Our computational study indicates that overlooking cross-selling between retail categories can result in substantial profit losses, suboptimal (narrower) assortments, and inadequate prices. The demonstrated tractability of the proposed model paves the way for "store-wide" optimization of categories that exhibit significant complementarity, which retailers can infer from market basket analysis. The second essay addresses an assortment packing problem where a decision maker optimizes the assortment and release times of products that belong to different categories over a multi-period planning horizon. Products in a same category are substitutable, whereas products across categories may exhibit complementarity relationships. All products have a longevity over which their attractiveness gradually decays (e.g., electronics or fashion products), while being positively or negatively impacted by the specific mix of substitutable or complementary products that the retailer has introduced. Our proposed 0-1 fractional program employs an attraction demand model and subsumes recent assortment packing models in the literature. We highlight the effect of overlooking cross-selling and cannibalization on the profit using an illustrative example. We develop linearized reformulation that afford exact solutions to small-sized problem instances. Furthermore, a linear programming-based heuristic approach is devised and is demonstrated to yield near-optimal solutions for large-scale computationally challenging problem instances in manageable times. Model extensions are discussed, especially in the context of the movie industry where exhibitors have to decide on the assortment of movies to display and their optimal display times.

Download or read book Essays on Assortment Planning with Consumer driven Substitution and Large scale Dynamic Programming written by Dorothée Honhon and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chapter 1, we consider a single-period assortment planning and inventory management problem for a retailer, using a locational choice model to represent consumer demand. We first determine the optimal variety, product location, and inventory decisions under static substitution. We show that the optimal solution can be such that the most popular product is not offered. We then obtain bounds on profit when customers dynamically substitute, using static substitution for the lower bound, and retailer-controlled substitution for the upper bound. We thus define two heuristics to solve the problem under dynamic substitution, and numerically evaluate their performance.

Download or read book RETAILING TRENDS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM written by R. Shanthi, M. Rafeeque Ahmed, S. Gurusamy, P. Murari and published by MJP Publisher. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of retail are old as trade itself. Barter was the oldest form of trade. For centuries, most merchandise was sold in market place or by peddlers. Medieval markets were dependent on local sources for supplies of perishable food because Journey was far too slow to allow for long distance transportation. However, customer did travel considerable distance for specialty items. The peddler, who provided people with the basic goods and necessities that they could not be self sufficient in, followed one of the earliest forms of retail trade. Even in prehistoric time, the peddler traveled long distances to bring products to locations which were in short supply. “They could be termed as early entrepreneurs who saw the opportunity in serving the needs of the consumers at a profit” Later retailers opened small shops, stocking them with such produce. As towns and cities grew, these retail stores began stocking a mix of convenience merchandise, enabling the formation of high-street bazaars that become the hub retail activity in every city. In the great sweep of social and retail history, the ‘modern’ shopping experience can be said to have commenced with the appearance of the department store in the middle of the 19th century.

Download or read book Essays on Assortment Planning and Inventory Management for Substitutable Products written by Ying Cao (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Essays on Individual Choice Modeling and Analysis written by Yulia Vorotyntseva and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation includes three essays. The first two essays are concerned with empirical investigation of individual choice by means of laboratory experiment, and the third one is concerned with integrating one particular behavior pattern – consumer learning – into assortment decisions. The summaries of these essays are provided below. In the first essay, we study how customers are choosing prices in a Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) business model. Under PWYW the price for a product is fully determined by a buyer: the seller cannot reject any offer. We study two factors that can potentially affect PWYW prices: the seller’s production costs and the buyer’s private valuation of the product. We hypothesize that buyers may anticipate the seller’s loss-aversion, so they will be reluctant to choose prices below the costs, and that the prices increase as the buyer’s valuation increases. We suggest a model that incorporates this hypothetical behavior and estimate it using the dataset from a previously published experimental study. Based on the preliminary insights we obtain, we design and conduct our own controlled laboratory experiment. Our findings suggest that PWYW prices are indeed increasing on average in the buyer’s valuation and seller’s costs. In the second essay we provide the results of empirical investigation of the behavior of human assortment planners. Assortment planning, that is, the selection of products to offer in a store or the design of a product line for a manufacturer, is often performed by managers without any support from computerized optimization algorithms. The goals of our study are (1) to find if human decision makers deviate from the expected profit-maximizing solution in some systematic way and (2) to investigate the effect of decision support tools on the efficacy of assortment planners. To do this, we develop and conduct a behavioral experiment, where the subjects are repeatedly picking assortments in a simplified computerized market environment. We find that the subjects perform better when the profit maximizing assortment consists of fewer products and that subjects improve their decisions over time. The effect of decision support is somewhat surprising: under certain conditions providing subjects with more information resulted in worse performance. In the third essay, we develop a model that explicitly incorporates consumer learning into a firm’s assortment problem. Consumer’s choice of a product from a particular category is influenced by her beliefs about how well the product fits her needs. When a consumer purchases a product repeatedly, her experience with it affects her beliefs and, consequently, her future choices. By providing the consumer with an assortment to choose from, the firm increases the chances that the consumer will find a product that is suitable for her and keep purchasing from the firm in the long term. However, by doing so the firm faces a risk that a less profitable product gets substituted for a more profitable one. The model we develop allows to investigate this tradeoff analytically.

Download or read book Product Assortment and Consumer Choice written by Alexander Chernev and published by Now Pub. This book was released on 2012 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Product Assortment and Consumer Choice: An Interdisciplinary Review examines existing literature and builds on the current theoretical developments across different research domains to develop a set of research propositions delineating the impact of product assortment on consumer choice. Taking a consumer's perspective to examine how product assortment influences decision making and choice, this monograph defines the consumer aspect of assortment research to answer three key questions. First, how do consumers perceive the variety of items in an assortment? The first part of this review examines factors that influence consumer perceptions of the variety of an assortment. In particular, it investigates how factors such as assortment size, the degree of distinctiveness of assortment options, the dispersion of option frequencies, and the organization of the assortment influence consumer perceptions of assortment variety. Second, how do consumers choose an item from a given assortment? The second part discusses factors that influence consumer choice of an item from a given assortment. It examines the impact of assortment size on the purchase likelihood from a given assortment, the number of options purchased, and the particular options chosen from the assortment. Third, how do consumers choose among assortments? The third part examines factors that influence consumer choice among assortments. In particular, it investigates how assortment size, assortment structure, and purchase quantity influence consumers' choice of an assortment. Conceptual analysis of the existing research in each of these three areas is summarized in a series of research propositions that integrate current findings and offer directions for future research. Product Assortment and Consumer Choice: An Interdisciplinary Review concludes with a discussion of the theoretical contributions and managerial implications of existing product assortment research and identify venues for further investigation.

Download or read book Essays on Consumer Heterogeneity and Optimal Stochastic Resource Allocation written by Maria Esther Mayorga and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Assortment Planning of Vertically Differentiated Products Under Consumer Choice written by Mrinmay Deb and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Consumer Choice with Unobserved Choice Sets written by Maura Coughlin and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that evaluate how consumers make decisions in settings where the researcher may not know the set of alternatives from which observed choices were selected. Many empirical analyses in economics presume the researcher knows the full set of alternatives an individual compared when selecting their most preferred. In practice, this assumption may fail to hold for a variety of reasons. In the first chapter, I introduce the economic setting of unobserved choice sets and consideration sets defining to this work. In the second chapter, my coauthors and I propose a robust method of discrete choice analysis when agents' choice sets are unobserved. Our core model assumes nothing about agents' choice sets apart from their minimum size. Importantly, it leaves unrestricted the dependence, conditional on observables, between agents' choice sets and their preferences. We first establish that the model is partially identified and characterize its sharp identification region. We then apply our theoretical findings to learn about households' risk preferences and choice sets from data on their deductible choices in auto collision insurance. The third chapter evaluates the prescription drug insurance choices of Medicare beneficiaries. I propose an empirical model of demand for prescription drug plans where non-monetary plan attributes stochastically determine the composition of the set of plans that an individual considers, and monetary plan attributes determine the individual's expected utility over contracts in her consideration set. This model reconciles the classic view of insurance contracts as lotteries with purely monetary outcomes with the empirical finding that choice among insurance plans is driven by their non-monetary attributes and financial attributes beyond their impacts on costs. I estimate the model using data from Medicare Part D allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in risk aversion and in consideration sets. I find that the latter plays a crucial role in plan choices, and in contrast to previous literature that assumes full consideration of all plans, I uncover an important role for risk aversion in determining individual choices.

Download or read book Consumer Choice written by Iris Van Hees and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consumer and Retailer Strategies when Choosing from Large Assortments written by Joseph K. Goodman and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumers are attracted to large assortments, but they experience negative consequences when they ultimately must make a choice form these large assortments. In Essay 1, four experiments examine whether a common retailer strategy--the use of recommendations such as "best seller" signs--attenuates or exacerbates these negative consequences. Results show that best seller signs can exacerbate decision difficulty and regret as consumers engage in a more extensive consideration of options, and these larger consideration sets are partly due to the increase consideration of non-signed options. The extent to which consumers have developed preferences is a key moderator of the effect of best seller signage on choice from large assortments. For consumers possessing more (less) developed preferences, best seller signage in large assortments increases (decreases) the size of consumer consideration sets and exacerbates (attenuates) decision difficulty and regret. The resultant choice outcome is that best seller signage is more likely to increase the overall quantity purchased when consumers have more compared to less developed preferences. Essay 2 investigates consideration set construction strategies consumers use to narrow down assortments into a more manageable consideration set, particularly when faced with large assortments. Past research proposes that consumers use two strategies to narrow down an assortment: include and exclude. Four experiments show that consumers are more likely to use an include strategy when faced with a large compared to a small assortment. It is argued that this preference for an include consideration set strategy is due to the decrease in relative effort required by an include strategy as the number of options in the set increases. The essay shows that compared to using an exclude strategy, the use of an include strategy leads consumers to (1) form smaller consideration sets, (2) express more (less) positive (negative) thoughts, (3) increase (decrease) the weighting of positive (negative) attributes, and (4) elaborate more on options in the consideration set and less on options not in the consideration set. The implications of using an include versus exclude strategy on final choice are explored and directions for future research are discussed.

Download or read book Discrete Choice Theory of Product Differentiation written by Simon P. Anderson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The discrete choice approach provides an ideal framework for describing the demands for differentiated products and can be used for studying most product differentiation models in the literature. By introducing extra dimensions of product heterogeneity, the framework also provides richer models of firm location and product selection."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Paradox of Choice written by Barry Schwartz and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions—both big and small—have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. As Americans, we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse. By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counter intuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on those that are important and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.