arXiv Machine Learning By Recep Yusuf Bekci, Stefanus Jasin, Joline Uichanco

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

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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.

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