Abstract

Consumers search for product information to resolve valuation uncertainties before purchase. We incorporate search cost into consumer choice models and study the two-stage consider-then-choose policy. In the first stage, a consumer forms her consideration set by balancing utility uncertainty and search cost; in the second stage, she evaluates all products in her consideration set and chooses the one with the highest net utility. We show that the revenue-ordered assortment fails to be optimal, although it can obtain at least half the optimal revenue. We propose a k-quasi attractiveness-ordered assortment and show that it can be arbitrarily near-optimal for the market share maximization problem. The assortment problems generally are NP-hard, so we develop efficient exact and approximation algorithms for a variety of assortment problems. For the joint assortment planning and pricing problem with homogeneous consumers, we show that the intrinsic-utility-ordered assortment and the quasi-same-price policy, which charges the same price for all products except at most one, are optimal.

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