TIME
2024年12月17日（周二）10:00 – 12:00
VENUE
信息管理与工程学院102报告厅
SPEAKER
Yicheng Liu (刘逸诚) is currently a PhD candidate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, under the supervision of Prof. Zizhuo Wang and Prof. Pin Gao. Previously, he obtained his bachelor’s degree at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His main research interest lies in the field of revenue management and pricing, with a particular focus on the discrete choice modeling and assortment optimization problems. He has also grown interest in mechanism design and distributionally robust optimization. For more information, you can visit his personal homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/yicheng-liu.
TITLE
Discrete Choice Modeling and Assortment Optimization: Consumer Behavioral Effects and New Business Models
ABSTRACT
We study a multi-store assortment planning problem in which a seller centrally decides the assortment of products in each store. Each store is visited by a certain fraction of customers. Upon arrival, customers observe the products offered in the current store. The seller can either 1) show products offered in other stores to customers simultaneously (called simultaneous offering strategy) or 2) show products offered in other stores to customers if they decide not to purchase in the current store (called sequential offering strategy). Customers may incur a disutility if they choose products from other stores. We study the optimal assortment planning problem under each of the two strategies and compare their performance. We show that under the simultaneous strategy, the optimal assortment for each store is revenue-ordered, and the seller cannot do better than if it operates each store separately. In contrast, adopting the sequential strategy can significantly increase the seller's revenue. In particular, when customers' disutilities of purchasing from other stores are universally homogeneous, the optimal assortment under the sequential offering strategy is revenue-ordered for each store, and the store with a lower (higher, resp.) demand should offer a larger (smaller, resp.) assortment to facilitate the sequential selling process. We then compare the two offering strategies in terms of the seller's revenue and customer surplus and analyze the impact of parameters on the revenue comparison. We also consider several extensions, e.g., heterogeneous valuation, capacity constraint, and partial recommendation, and find that our main results still hold qualitatively. Finally, we study the joint assortment and pricing problem under both strategies. The sequential offering strategy may be a better strategy for sellers in practice. We provide detailed guidelines for sellers to implement the sequential strategy, such as regarding the optimal assortment decisions and when sellers can exploit the most benefits.
编审：张耀武 江波
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