The Assortment Packing Problem: Multiperiod Assortment Planning for Short-Lived Products

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Caro, Felipe; Martinez-de-Albeniz, Victor; Rusmevichientong, Paat
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; University of Navarra; IESE Business School; University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2014.1991
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 2701-2721
• 关键词: analysis of algorithms; suboptimal algorithms; Marketing; product policy; fractional programming; attraction model; Assortment Optimization

摘要

Motivated by retailers' frequent introduction of new items to refresh product lines and maintain their market shares, we present the assortment packing problem in which a firm must decide, in advance, the release date of each product in a given collection over a selling season. Our formulation models the trade-offs among profit margins, preference weights, and limited life cycles. A key aspect of the problem is that each product is short-lived in the sense that, once introduced, its attractiveness lasts only a few periods and vanishes over time. The objective is to determine when to introduce each product to maximize the total profit over the selling season. Even for two periods, the corresponding optimization problem is shown to be NP-complete. As a result, we study a continuous relaxation of the problem that approximates the problem well, when the number of products is large. When margins are identical and product preferences decay exponentially, its solution can be characterized: it is optimal to introduce products with slower decays earlier. The structural properties of the relaxation also help us to develop several heuristics, for which we establish performance guarantees. We test our heuristics with data on sales and release dates of women's handbags from an accessories retailer. The numerical experiments show that the heuristics perform very well and can yield significant improvements in profitability.