Optimizing product assortment under customer-driven demand substitution

Eda Yücel, Fikri Karaesmen, F. Sibel Salman and Metin Türkay

European Journal of Operational Research, 2009, vol. 199, issue 3, 759-768

Abstract: The problem of product assortment and inventory planning under customer-driven demand substitution is analyzed and a mathematical model for this problem is provided in this paper. Realistic issues in a retail context such as supplier selection, shelf space constraints, and poor quality procurement are also taken into account. The performance of three modified models, one that neglects customers' substitution behavior, another that excludes supplier selection decision, and one that ignores shelf space limitations, are analyzed separately with computational experiments. The results of the analysis demonstrate that neglecting customer-driven substitution or excluding supplier selection or ignoring shelf space limitations may lead to significantly inefficient assortments. The effects of demand variability and substitution cost on optimal assortment and supplier selection decisions as well as on the optimal revenue are also investigated. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a practical and flexible model to aid retailers in finding optimal assortments to maximize the expected profit.

Keywords: Retailing; Inventory; Demand; substitution; Product; assortment; Supplier; selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(08)00698-X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:199:y:2009:i:3:p:759-768

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().