Constrained Assortment Optimization for the Nested Logit Model

Guillermo Gallego () and Huseyin Topaloglu ()
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Guillermo Gallego: Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
Huseyin Topaloglu: School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853

Management Science, 2014, vol. 60, issue 10, 2583-2601

Abstract: We study assortment optimization problems where customer choices are governed by the nested logit model and there are constraints on the set of products offered in each nest. Under the nested logit model, the products are organized in nests. Each product in each nest has a fixed revenue associated with it. The goal is to find a feasible set of products, i.e., a feasible assortment, to maximize the expected revenue per customer. We consider cardinality and space constraints on the offered assortment, which limit the number of products and the total space consumption of the products offered in each nest, respectively. We show that the optimal assortment under cardinality constraints can be obtained efficiently by solving a linear program. The assortment optimization problem under space constraints is NP-hard. We show how to obtain an assortment with a performance guarantee of 2 under space constraints. This assortment also provides a performance guarantee of 1/(1- (epsilon) ) when the space requirement of each product is at most a fraction (epsilon) of the space availability in each nest. Building on our results for constrained assortment optimization, we show that we can efficiently solve joint assortment optimization and pricing problems under the nested logit model, where we choose the assortment of products to offer to customers, as well as the prices of the offered products.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1931 . This paper was accepted by Dimitris Bertsimas, optimization.

Keywords: assortment optimization; nested logit model; revenue management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (49)

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