Download or read book The Impact of Consumer Search Cost on Assortment Planning and Pricing written by Ruxian Wang and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumers search for product information to resolve valuation uncertainties before purchase. We incorporate search cost into consumer choice models and study the two-stage consider-then-choose policy. In the first stage, a consumer forms her consideration set by balancing utility uncertainty and search cost; in the second stage, she evaluates all products in her consideration set and chooses the one with the highest net utility. We show that the revenue-ordered assortment (i.e., the offer set that includes products in the revenue-decreasing order) fails to be optimal, although it can obtain at least half the optimal revenue. We propose a k-quasi attractiveness-ordered assortment and show that it can be arbitrarily near-optimal for the market share maximization problem. The assortment problems with search cost are generally NP-hard, so we develop efficient approximation or relatively fast exact algorithms for a variety of assortment problems under the consider-then-choose models with search cost. For the joint assortment planning and pricing problem with homogeneous consumers, we show that the intrinsic-utility-ordered assortment and the quasi-same-price policy, which charges the same price for all products except at most one, are optimal.

Download or read book Essays in Process Improvement and Assortment Planning written by Yi Xu and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book When Prospect Theory Meets Consumer Choice Models written by Ruxian Wang and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Problem Definition: Reference prices arise as price expectations against which consumers evaluate products in their purchase scenarios. We investigate what will happen when prospect theory (e.g., reference prices) meets consumer choice models from the perspectives of both the consumers and the firm.Academic/Practical Relevance: Consumers see multiple relevant products on a particular purchase occasion, and often compare their prices to form the willingness to pay when considering whether to purchase a particular product. Reference prices, which are not included in many choice models, may impact consumer choice behavior, so we incorporate reference prices into consumer choice models and investigate the operations management problems.Methodology: We take the widely used multi-nomial logit model as a showcase to examine the effects of reference prices through analytical and empirical study. We consider the optimization problems on assortment planning and pricing under consumer choice models with a variety of reference prices, including the lowest price and the assortment variety.Results: Our empirical study on a real data set demonstrates that incorporating reference prices into choice models can significantly improve goodness-of-fit and prediction accuracy of consumer choice behavior. Furthermore, we characterize the optimal policies for the assortment planning and pricing problems under the consumer choice models with various reference prices. In particular for the pricing problems under the reference prices defined by either the lowest price or assortment variety, we show that the optimal pricing policy has the following structure: products can be grouped into several categories based on their costs; the products in the same category charge either the same profit markup or the same price.Managerial Implications: In practice, reference prices should be taken into account in model estimation and operations management. Ignoring reference prices may lead to substantial losses.

Download or read book Revenue Management and Pricing Analytics written by Guillermo Gallego and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-08-14 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.

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 Advances in E Business Engineering for Ubiquitous Computing written by Kuo-Ming Chao and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 633 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the latest trends in scientific methods and enabling technologies to advance e-business. It consists of selected high-quality papers from the 16th International Conference on E-Business Engineering (ICEBE 2019), held in Shanghai, China, on 11–13 October 2019. ICEBE is a leading international forum for researchers, engineers, and business specialists to exchange cutting-edge ideas, findings, and experiences in the field of e-business. The book covers a range of topics, including agents for e-business, big data for e-business, Internet of Things, mobile and autonomous computing, security/privacy/trust, service-oriented and cloud computing, software engineering, blockchain, and industry applications.

Download or read book Hybrid Model for Sequential and Simultaneous Choice with Search Cost written by Ruxian Wang and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper we propose a hybrid model to study sequential and simultaneous choice behavior in the presence of search cost. After examining all products in an assortment, a rational consumer decides whether to continue searching. Switching from one assortment to another often incurs a search cost that is often related to transportation expense or time. We combine the classic sequential search model with the famous simultaneous discrete choice model, and develop a unified framework to investigate the impact of search cost on the sequential and simultaneous choice behavior. The proposed framework involves a deterministic utility in the discrete choice model under the random utility maximization theory. We consider the associated operations problems including price optimization and competition, assortment planning, search cost management and model estimation. In particular, the prices or markups are product-invariant at optimality for each assortment, and the optimal prices for the products in the first assortment are increasing in search cost while they are decreasing for the products in the second assortment. The assortment optimization problems are generally NP-hard, so we develop efficient heuristics and approximation schemes. Finally, we characterize the likelihood functions, and develop efficient estimation algorithms for complete and incomplete data scenarios. An empirical study shows that the hybrid search and choice model can improve the goodness-of-fit and prediction accuracy for consumer choice, sales and revenue in the shopping scenarios with multiple stores in different locations. Failure to account for the hybrid features of consumer choice and the impact of search cost may lead to substantial losses in operations management. The developed solution approaches are readily applicable in practice.

Download or read book Assortment Optimization and Pricing Under the Threshold Based Choice Models written by Xu Tian and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper, we study revenue maximization assortment and pricing problems under threshold-based choice models, where a product is placed in a consumer's consideration set if its utility to the consumer exceeds the utility of an outside option by a specified threshold. We discuss two such models: the relative utility and absolute utility threshold-based choice models. For both models, the best revenue-ordered assortment and same-price policy can not achieve the optimal profit for the assortment problem or the pricing problem. Further, the revenue-maximizing assortment problem is NP-complete or NP-hard. However, we show that a performance guarantee relative to the optimal policy can be found for each model: for the relative utility model, by employing the best revenue-ordered assortment and same-price policy; for the absolute utility model, via a dynamic-program-based algorithm and a same-price policy. Finally, we show that our algorithms can be asymptotically optimal if the search cost of consumers is sufficiently small.

Download or read book Consumer Driven Demand and Operations Management Models written by Serguei Netessine and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Product Assortment and Price Competition Under Multinomial Logit Demand written by Omar Besbes and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of assortment planning and pricing in shaping sales and profits of retailers is well documented and studied in monopolistic settings. However, such a role remains relatively unexplored in competitive environments. In this paper, we study equilibrium behavior of competing retailers in two settings: i.) when prices are exogenously fixed, and retailers compete in assortments only; and ii.) when retailers compete jointly in assortment and prices. For this, we model consumer choice using a multinomial Logit, and assume that each retailer selects products from a predefined set, and faces a display constraint. We show that when the sets of products available to retailers do not overlap, there always exists one equilibrium that pareto-dominates all others, and that such an outcome can be reached through an iterative process of best responses. A direct corollary of our results is that competition leads a firm to offer a broader set of products compared to when it is operating as a monopolist, and to broader offerings in the market compared to a centralized planner. When some products are available to all retailers, i.e., assortments might overlap, we show that display constraints drive equilibrium existence properties.

Download or read book Retail Category Management written by Alexander Hübner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Retail shelf management means cost-efficiently aligning retail operations with consumer demand. As consumers expect high product availability and low prices, and retailers are constantly increasing product variety and striving towards high service levels, the complexity of managing retail business and its operations is growing enormously. Retailers need to match consumer demand with shelf supply by balancing variety (number of products) and service levels (number of items of a product), and by optimizing demand and profit through carefully calibrated prices. As a result the core strategic decisions a retailer must make involve assortment sizes, shelf space assignment and pricing levels. Rigorous quantitative methods have emerged as the most promising solution to this problem. The individual chapters in this book therefore focus on three areas: (1) combining assortment and shelf space planning, (2) providing efficient decision support systems for practically relevant problem sizes, and (3) integrating inventory and price optimization into shelf management.

Download or read book Operations in an Omnichannel World written by Santiago Gallino and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of retailing has changed dramatically in the past decade. Sales originating at online channels have been steadily increasing, and even for sales transacted at brick-and-mortar channels, a much larger fraction of sales is affected by online channels in different touch points during the customer journey. Shopper behavior and expectations have been evolving along with the growth of digital channels, challenging retailers to redesign their fulfillment and execution processes, to better serve their customers. This edited book examines the challenges and opportunities arising from the shift towards omni- channel retail. We examine these issues through the lenses of operations management, emphasizing the supply chain transformations associated with fulfilling an omni-channel demand. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, “Omni-channel business models”, we present four studies that explore how retailers are adjusting their fundamental business models to the new omni-channel landscape. The second part, “Data-driven decisions in an omni-channel world”, includes five chapters that study the evolving data opportunities enabled by omni-channel retail and present specific examples of data-driven analyses. Finally, in the third part, “Case studies in Omni-channel retailing”, we include four studies that provide a deep dive into how specific industries, companies and markets are navigating the omni-channel world. Ultimately, this book introduces the reader to the fundamentals of operations in an omni-channel context and highlights the different innovative research ideas on the topic using a variety of methodologies.

Download or read book Retail Assortment and Price Competition When Consumers Are Uncertain About Product Tastes written by Stephen Gilbert and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many products, consumers may need to physically experience them in order to assess their own valuations. We consider how such uncertainty can affect the equilibrium pricing and assortment choices among competing retailers. Specifically, we consider a market that consists of two retailers with identical cost structures and two products with symmetric underlying demand. We characterize the pricing equilibria for each possible set of assortments based on how consumers optimally search for products in response to observed prices and assortments, and show how the structure of a retailer's inter-temporal pricing pattern (EDLP or HLP) should depend upon his own as well as his rival's assortment and the search costs. In addition, we provide conditions under which the retailers carry asymmetric assortment breadths in equilibrium.

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 A Simple Way Towards Fair Assortment Planning written by Wentao Lu and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large e-commerce retailers and department stores function as marketplaces for millions of sellers, and consumers rely on the platform's assortment and display decisions to examine different sellers and make purchase decisions. Traditionally, the primary objective of these marketplaces for assortment planning is to maximize expected revenue, which create unfairness among sellers, as only a single assortment with the highest expected revenue is chosen. This results in some sellers being excluded from recommendations or assortments, with minimal market exposure and revenue, leading to a disproportional distribution of revenue among sellers. To address this issue, we propose fairness constraints that ensure fairer market exposures for all sellers. These constraints require each seller to have a minimum market exposure, which may depend on the seller's reputation, product quality, and price, among other features. We show that the optimal solution with fairness constraints is to randomize over at most $n$ nested assortments, where $n$ is the number of sellers (or products). The solution can be found in polynomial time. We then consider the case where there are additional constraints including imposing cardinality constraint on the assortments, and limiting the number of different assortments, for which we characterize the structure of the optimal solutions and propose efficient heuristics. We also explore the impact of fairness constraints on consumer welfare, showing that it always increases when such constraints are imposed. We show that all sellers and the platform could also benefit when fairness constraints induce new sellers with high quality products enter the platform resulting in a win-win-win situation for all parties involved. When there is no new seller entry, we identify cases when total welfare improves and propose a revenue redistributing mechanism to achieve a win-win-win solution.

Download or read book The New Science of Retailing written by Marshall Fisher and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Retailers today are drowning in data but lacking in insight. They have so much information at their disposal that they struggle with both how to sort through it, and how to add science to their decision-making process without blunting the art that they correctly believe is a key ingredient of their success. This book reveals how retailers can use data to manage everything from strategic assortment planning, inventory management, and markdowns to improve store-level execution. This data-driven approach to the retail supply chain leads to far greater and faster inventory turns, far fewer and lower discounted goods and services, and better profit margins. The authors also tease out the personnel issues and the organizational implications of this approach.

Download or read book Demand for Variety Under Costly Consumer Search written by William Jacob Allender and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumers search before making virtually any purchase. The notion that consumers engage in costly search is well-understood to have deep implications for market performance. However to date, no theoretical model allows for the observation that consumers often purchase more than a single product in an individual shopping occasion. Clothing, food, books, and music are but four important examples of goods that are purchased many items at a time. I develop a modeling approach that accounts for multi-purchase occasions in a structural way. My model shows that as preference for variety increases, so does the size of the consideration set. Search models that ignore preference for variety are, therefore, likely to under-predict the number of products searched. It is generally thought that lower search costs increase retail competition which pushes prices and assortments down. However, I show that there is an optimal number of products to offer depending on the intensity of consumer search costs. Consumers with high search costs prefer to shop at a store with a large assortment of goods and purchase multiple products, even if the prices that firm charges is higher than competing firms' prices. On the other hand, consumers with low search costs tend to purchase fewer goods and shop at the stores that have lower prices, as long as the store has a reasonable assortment offering. The implications for market performance are dramatic and pervasive. In particular, the misspecification of demand model in which search is important and/or multiple discreteness is observed will produce biased parameter estimates leading to erroneous managerial conclusions.