题   目：Redirecting Consumer Demand: Managing Product Substitutions with Coupons

嘉　宾：卢文涛 副教授 中国科学技术大学

主持人：曾智宇 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时　间：2026年9月18日（周五）10:00-11:30

地　点：上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院包兆龙图书馆A507

内容简介：

Firms offering multiple substitutable products face the challenge of managing demand substitution among products. Traditional assortment optimization treats product substitution as exogenously given and relies solely on the optimization of offered products. In this paper, we study how firms can proactively redirect demand by using coupons as targeted, post-selection tools within a discrete choice framework. We incorporate coupon offering in the multinomial logit model and analyze the resulting assortment and pricing problems. Under uniform coupons, an optimal assortment and promoted set can be chosen as revenue-ordered sets, reducing the joint optimization problem to O(nˆ2) candidates. With a cardinality constraint, an exact solution can be obtained by evaluating O(nˆ6) candidate pairs. We further show that, in the assortment setting, coupons can generate arbitrarily large revenue gains relative to the coupon-free benchmark. When prices are endogenous, optimal prices share a common markup, and coupons effectively serve as a second price offer with a lower markup. The resulting optimal profit is at most twice its coupon-free counterpart. In the extension, we show that the revenue-boosting effect of coupons remains robust to strategic consumer behavior. We also examine general product-specific coupons, establish that assortment optimization is NP-hard under a fixed coupon matrix, and develop tractable revenue-ordered heuristics. This paper shows that coupons are an effective and powerful tool for managing product substitution and boosting revenue. Our findings suggest that coupons are most effective in environments where prices are rigid or costly to adjust.

演讲人简介：

Wentao Lu is a non-tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Management Science at the University of Science and Technology of China. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. He holds two bachelor's degrees—one from Tongji University and one from ESSEC Business School—a master's degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include discrete choice models, assortment optimization, multi-armed bandits, social learning, fairness in operations management, and supply chain management.

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