Price Discounts and Customized Product Assortment under Multinomial Logit Choice Model: A Robust Approach

Abstract

With increasing availability of consumer data and rapid advancement and applications of technologies, online retailers are gaining better knowledge of shopping behavior and preferences of their customers. Thus more and more retailers are providing customized product assortment to better match the needs of customers and generate more sales. In this paper, we study a two-stage revenue management model where a retailer decides non-customized price discounts at stage one due to fairness consideration and customized product assortment at stage two (upon the arrival of customers) under the multinomial logit choice model. We employ a robust approach for the joint discounts and customized assortment optimization problem to handle data uncertainty for estimating customer preferences and distribution of different customer segments. We analyze the structural properties of the problems and propose efficient computational methods to solve the problems with/without cardinality constraint on the assortment. In certain cases, our algorithm converges at a superlinear rate. When there is a cardinality constraint on the assortment, we find the retailer should offer deeper discounts as the constraint becomes more restrictive. We also provide some discussion on the value of our robust solution and the extension when the customer discount sensitivity function is also uncertain. Finally, our extensive numerical study shows that the solutions under the robust approach perform very well compared to the one assuming accurate information and has robustness when there is uncertainty.