We propose a sequential recommendation-selection model where a seller recommends sets of products to consumers over multiple stages. consumers are heterogeneous in the patience levels, characterized by a certain number of stages that a consumer is willing to go through when making a purchase....

We propose and study a threshold utility model (TUM) where consumers buy any product whose net utility exceeds a non-negative, product-specific threshold. The thresholds are selected to maximize the expected surplus of the representative consumer subject to a bound on the expected number of...

We show the equivalence of discrete choice models and the class of binary choice forests, which are random forests based on binary choice trees. This suggests that standard machine learning techniques based on random forests can serve to estimate discrete choice models with an interpretable...

We consider a game between two capacity providers that compete for customers through a broker who earns commissions on sales. The providers compete by selecting commission margins and sales targets above which the margins on all sales increase. We are interested in the form of the contracts in...

A flexible product is a menu of two or more alternatives products serving the same market. Purchasers of flexible products are assigned to one of the alternatives at a later date. Gallego and Phillips show that capacitated suppliers, such as airlines and hotels, can potentially improve revenue...

In the k-prophet problem, a decision maker observes n items sequentially and selects up to k n items without recourse to maximize the total expected reward of the selected items. We consider a soft version of the problem where the decision maker can select up to k items in expectation rather...

Capacity providers often experience a mismatch between supply and demand that can be partially alleviated while improving revenues by allowing for product upgrades. When prices are fixed and demands are independent, the problem is to decide which customer demands to upgrade to which products and...

Manzini and Mariotti [Manzini, Paola, Marco Mariotti. 2014. Stochastic choice and consideration sets. Econometrica 82(3) 1153-1176.] propose a consideration set based choice model that postulates a full preference ordering as well as exogenous attention probabilities from which consideration...

We address two important concerns faced by assortment managers, namely constrained assortment optimization and assortment personalization. We contribute to addressing these concerns by developing bounds and heuristics based on auxiliary multinomial logit (MNL) models. More precisely, we first...

We study a joint assortment and inventory optimization problem faced by an online retailer who needs to decide on both the assortment along with the inventories of a set of N substitutable products before the start of the selling season to maximize the expected profit. The problem raises both...