讲座:When is Assortment Optimization Optimal? 发布时间:2022-05-23

  • 活动时间:
  • 活动地址:
  • 主讲人:

题 目When is Assortment Optimization Optimal?

嘉 宾Will Ma 助理教授 哥伦比亚大学

主持人:曹宇峰 助理教授 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时 间20220525日(周三)10:00-11:30(腾讯会议)

(校内师生如需获取会议号和密码,请于524日晚上18点前发送电邮至mliu18@sjtu.edu.cn获取)

内容简介:

Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling fixed-price items to a buyer who wants at most one of them. Despite being faced whenever retailers are deciding which brands/variants of a good to offer, the best method for selling these items with fixed prices is not well understood. Academic work has focused on the specific selling method of making a subset ("assortment") of items immediately available, while selling methods involving randomization have begun appearing in practice.

In this paper we analyze the revenue possible from any selling method, given that the buyer's preference is private but randomly drawn from a known distribution. In particular, we introduce a Bayesian mechanism design problem where the items have fixed prices, the buyer has a random ranking over the items given these prices (and an outside option), and the seller optimizes a (randomized) allocation of up to one item. We show that assortment-based allocations are suboptimal in general, but under many commonly-studied Bayesian priors for buyer rankings such as the Multi-Nomial Logit (MNL) and Markov Chain choice models, assortments are in fact optimal. Therefore, this large literature on assortment optimization has much greater significance than appreciated before — it is not only computing optimal assortments; it is computing the economic limit of the seller's revenue for selling these fixed-price substitute items.

We derive several further results — a more general sufficient condition for assortments being optimal that captures choice models beyond Markov Chain, a proof that Nested Logit choice models cannot be captured by Markov Chain but can to some extent be captured by our condition, and suboptimality gaps for assortments when our condition does not hold. Finally, we show that our mechanism design problem provides the tightest-known Linear Programming relaxation for assortment optimization under explicit ranking distributions.

演讲人简介:

Will Ma is an Assistant Professor of Decision, Risk, and Operations at Columbia Business School. His research interests include the analysis of online algorithms, data-driven modeling, and optimization theory, applied to revenue and supply chain management. His research is partially funded by Amazon. Previously, he had been a postdoctoral researcher at Google, and received his Ph.D. from the MIT Operations Research Center. Will has also had experience as a video game start-up founder and a professional poker player, designing the poker class that is taught annually at MIT.


欢迎广大师生参加!