Centres Of Excellence

To focus on new and emerging areas of research and education, Centres of Excellence have been established within the Institute. These ‘virtual' centres draw on resources from its stakeholders, and interact with them to enhance core competencies

Read More >>

Faculty

Faculty members at IIMB generate knowledge through cutting-edge research in all functional areas of management that would benefit public and private sector companies, and government and society in general.

Read More >>

IIMB Management Review

Journal of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

IIM Bangalore offers Degree-Granting Programmes, a Diploma Programme, Certificate Programmes and Executive Education Programmes and specialised courses in areas such as entrepreneurship and public policy.

Read More >>

About IIMB

The Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) believes in building leaders through holistic, transformative and innovative education

Read More >>

Optimal Algorithms for Assortment Selection Under Ranking-Based Consumer Choice Models

Dorothee Honhon, Sreelata Jonnalagedda and Xiajun Amy Pan
Journal Name
Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
Journal Publication
UT Dallas 24
Publication Year
2012
Journal Publications Functional Area
Marketing
Publication Date
Vol. 14, Issue 2, 2012, P 279-289
Abstract

A retailer's product selection decisions are largely driven by her assumptions on how consumers make choices. We use a ranking-based consumer choice model to represent consumer preferences: every customer has a ranking of the potential products in the category and purchases his highest ranked product (if any) offered in the assortment. We consider four practically motivated special cases of this model, namely, the one-way substitution, the locational choice, the outtree, and the intree preference models, and we study the retailer's product selection problem when products have different price and cost parameters. We assume that the retailer incurs a fixed carrying cost per product offered, a goodwill penalty for each customer who does not purchase his first choice and a lost sale penalty for each customer who does not find an acceptable product to buy. For the first three models, we obtain efficient solution methods that simplify to either a shortest path method or a dynamic program. For the fourth model, we construct an effective algorithm and show numerically that, in practice, it is much faster than enumeration. We also obtain valuable insights on the structure of the optimal assortment.

Optimal Algorithms for Assortment Selection Under Ranking-Based Consumer Choice Models

Author(s) Name: Dorothee Honhon, Sreelata Jonnalagedda and Xiajun Amy Pan
Journal Name: Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
Volume: Vol. 14, Issue 2, 2012, P 279-289
Year of Publication: 2012
Abstract:

A retailer's product selection decisions are largely driven by her assumptions on how consumers make choices. We use a ranking-based consumer choice model to represent consumer preferences: every customer has a ranking of the potential products in the category and purchases his highest ranked product (if any) offered in the assortment. We consider four practically motivated special cases of this model, namely, the one-way substitution, the locational choice, the outtree, and the intree preference models, and we study the retailer's product selection problem when products have different price and cost parameters. We assume that the retailer incurs a fixed carrying cost per product offered, a goodwill penalty for each customer who does not purchase his first choice and a lost sale penalty for each customer who does not find an acceptable product to buy. For the first three models, we obtain efficient solution methods that simplify to either a shortest path method or a dynamic program. For the fourth model, we construct an effective algorithm and show numerically that, in practice, it is much faster than enumeration. We also obtain valuable insights on the structure of the optimal assortment.