On Wednesday, 2021-04-21, Prof. Weili XUE [薛巍立] of Southeast University [东南大学] gave his invited talk "Operations Management under Consumer Choice Models with Multiple Purchases." The talk showed that the profit of a company can significantly be improved if they consider that customers may purchase more than one item of a given product and that the amount and product they purchase depends on the pricing and utility. Such considerations are important both in online sales as well as for brick-and-mortar stores. We are deeply thankful for this very nice and insightful talk and for the inspiring discussion thereafter. On the same day, we also hosted invited talks by Prof. Min LI [李敏] (Nanjing University) and Assoc. Prof. Vincent Chau (Southeast University).
Talk Information
报 告 人:
薛巍立
所属单位:
东南大学经济管理学院
报告时间:
2021 年 04 月 21 日(星期三) 14:00-15:00
报告地点:
应用优化研究所会议室(合肥学院南艳湖校区 53 栋 920)
摘要:
This paper investigates the effects of multiple purchases that arise in the retailing of consumer goods. The product choice and consumer surplus depend not only on what to purchase but also on how many units to purchase. We incorporate the multiple purchases into consumer choice behavior and study a series of associated operations problems. We take the widely-used multinomial logit (MNL) model as a showcase and incorporate the effects of multiple purchases into the classic discrete choice model. In the new choice framework, consumers first form a consideration set, then select one product from consideration set and determine the purchase quantity of the selected product. In the absence of fixed cost, we characterize the structure of the optimal policy for the assortment optimization problem; whereas in the presence of product-differentiated fixed costs, the assortment problem becomes NP-complete, so we propose an efficient heuristic. We further develop a polynomial-time algorithm for the assortment problem with identical fixed cost for each product. For the joint assortment and pricing problem, we show it can be decoupled into multiple pricing problems of different assortment sizes, each of which can be transformed into a single-variable problem.