Commonly there are two types of local search approaches known to treat combinatorial optimization problems with very complex search-space structure: One is to introduce very complicated types of local move classes, allowing a bypass of high energetic barriers separating different minima. The...

Designing and pricing new products is one of the most critical activities for a firm, and it is well-known that taking into account consumer preferences for design decisions is essential for products later to be successful in a competitive environment (e.g., Urban and Hauser 1993). Consequently,...

We investigate the application of two topic models, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and the correlated topic model (CTM), to market basket analysis. Topic models measure the association between observed purchases and underlying latent activities of shoppers by conceiving each basket as random...

Results on cross category effects obtained by explanatory market basket analyses may be biased as studies typically investigate only a small fraction of the retail assortment (Chib et al. in Advances in econometrics, vol 16. Econometric models in marketing. JAI, Amsterdam, pp 57–92, <CitationRef CitationID="CR11">2002</CitationRef>). We...</citationref>

The multinomial probit model introduced here combines heterogeneity across households with flexibility of the (deterministic) utility function. To achieve flexibility deterministic utility is approximated by a neural net of the multilayer perceptron type. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo method serves...

We investigate whether the latent class multinomial logit choice model with segmentspecific linear utility functions implies effects that are similar to those of parametric homogeneous nonlinear models given that this latent class model performs at least as well. The two nonlinear models have...