学术动态 | 讲座预告

报告摘要

Fashion retailers adjust their product assortments frequently to enhance profitability and customer satisfaction. Advanced analytics-driven systems supporting this process focus primarily on revenue improvement and have led to significant reductions in markdowns and increases in sales. However, this revenue-focused approach often results in the under-representation of plus-sized options which raise fairness concerns and negatively affects brand perception. This paper is motivated by a collaboration with a major European online fashion retailer and aims to tackle this issue by adjusting option planning to balance revenue and size inclusivity. We consider a choice model that allows for size substitution and develop a measure of pairwise fairness among customer size groups. We then integrate this measure into the assortment optimization problem of an online fashion retailer. We transform the problem into a zero-sum game and develop exact and approximate algorithms to find its Nash equilibria. We interpret mixed strategy equilibria as the online retailer displaying multiple assortments randomly. These assortments may also conceal inventory, that is, not displaying all size SKUs of an option in the assortment. We estimate the size substitution coefficients and calibrate our model using a real dataset provided by our industrial partner. Simulation results show that our approximation algorithm can reduce unfairness by 30% with only 1.5% sacrifice in revenue. The results demonstrate the practicality of our algorithm as the retailer typically randomizes over a few assortments. Further, the optimality gap is relatively small, highlighting the algorithm's efficiency.

报告人简介

Javad Nasiry is a professor of Operations Management at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management where he joined in 2019.  His main research interests are in behavioral operations, supply chain management, sustainability, retail operations, and operations-marketing interface.  His work in behavioral operations elaborates on whether and how psychological phenomena such as reference effects may affect aggregate variables (e.g., market demand) and their implications on firms' operational policies especially in pricing, inventory, and assortment.  He employs both analytical and experimental research methods to explore the related research questions.  His research in sustainable operations focuses on the environmental consequences of new business models in apparel, renewable energy, and agriculture industries. Since August 2022, Javad is the director of Sustainable Growth Initiative (SGI) which is a cross-faculty initiative to mobilize the talent and expertise within McGill University to help businesses move towards more socially and environmentally sustainable business models. Prior to joining McGill, he was an associate professor of operations management in the School of Business and Management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) where he joined in 2010.