arXiv Machine Learning

Borrowing Strength Across Stores: Transfer Learning for Choice-Based Revenue Management

The paper proposes a shrinkage estimator that blends store‑specific demand estimates with pooled information from other stores under a multinomial logit model, addressing the trade‑off between local data scarcity and cross‑store heterogeneity. By leveraging self‑concordant‑like properties of the MNL likelihood, the authors derive finite‑sample performance guarantees and regret bounds for assortment and pricing decisions. Numerical experiments and an empirical study on European apparel retailer data show that this transfer‑learning approach improves out‑of‑sample product prioritization and revenue capture compared to both local estimation and full pooling.

arXiv AI
Oct 12

AI-Mediation in Retail Markets: Revenue Effects and Assortment Optimization

The paper investigates how AI shopping assistants influence retail assortment planning by mediating product visibility. It models two mediation types—deterministic ranking and stochastic Plackett‑Luce ranking—and shows that ignoring AI mediation can lead to significant revenue losses (2.52%–11.37%). A simpler deterministic plug‑in approach reduces losses to at most 0.53%, and the authors prove that deterministic mediation allows a fully polynomial‑time approximation scheme for assortment optimization when customer segments are fixed.

By Omar El Housni, Marouane Ibn Brahim
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Robust Assortment Optimization from Observational Data

The paper introduces a robust framework for assortment optimization that addresses distributional shifts in customer choice behavior. It demonstrates computational tractability when the nominal choice model is known and develops statistically optimal algorithms for the data‑driven setting, providing matching upper and lower bounds on sample complexity. The authors identify "robust item‑wise coverage" as the minimal data requirement for efficient robust learning, bridging robustness and statistical efficiency in assortment planning.

By Miao Lu, Yuxuan Han, Han Zhong, Zhengyuan Zhou, Jose Blanchet
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Better Capturing Interactions Between Products in~Retail: Revisited Negative Sampling for~Basket Choice Modeling

The paper presents a basket‑choice model that learns embeddings to capture interactions among products, prices, and stores, using random negative sampling to handle large item sets. Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate that sampling based on the actual assortment improves performance over existing methods. The model is validated on millions of transactions from Fortenova Group, showing potential to aid category managers in retail decision‑making.

By Jules D\'esir, Vincent Auriau, Martin Mo\v{z}ina, Emmanuel Malherbe