Abstract

We study a family of stylized assortment planning problems, where arriving customers make purchase decisions among offered products based on maximizing their utility. Given limited display capacity and no a priori information on consumers' utility, the retailer must select which subset of products to offer. By offering different assortments and observing the resulting purchase behavior, the retailer learns about consumer preferences, but this experimentation should be balanced with the goal of maximizing revenues. We develop a family of dynamic policies that judiciously balance the aforementioned tradeoff between exploration and exploitation, and prove that their performance cannot be improved upon in a precise mathematical sense. One salient feature of these policies is that they "quickly" recognize, and hence limit experimentation on, strictly suboptimal products.

Authors
Assaf Zeevi and Denis Saure
Format
Working Paper
Publication Date

Full Citation

Zeevi, Assaf and Denis Saure
. Optimal dynamic assortment planning. February 15, 2010.