Demand Transfer Estimation at Scale via Restricted Logit Modeling
arXiv:2608. 12680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Item demand forecasting is an integral component of store assortment optimization.
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:2608. 12680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Item demand forecasting is an integral component of store 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.
arXiv:2209. 04942v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Problem definition: This paper studies the problem of estimating consumer preferences from bundle sales 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.
arXiv:2301.12254v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Assortment optimization has received active explorations in the past few decades due to its practical importance. Despite the extensive liter...
arXiv:2609.16952v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Feature-based multi-product pricing uses customer characteristics to identify demand heterogeneity and tailor prices across products. Choice model tr...
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.
arXiv:2608.21334v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Short observational pricing panels often contain many observations but few distinct price movements. We evaluate the inferential consequences of th...
arXiv:2607. 13314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tabular foundation models (TFMs) generate predictions on structured data via in-context learning, without task-specific estimation.
arXiv:2606. 11118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a dynamic assortment problem on a two-sided service platform with incomplete information and heterogeneous customers in a discrete-time setting.
arXiv:2610.22516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In modern commerce, firms and platforms typically use customer features from different sources to personalize prices: some features are verified usin...
arXiv:2608. 03142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study contextual dynamic pricing with arbitrary covariate sequences and bounded, possibly nonbinary purchase quantities.