Research & Publications Office to host seminar on ‘Strawberry or Vanilla this Week? How to Optimize Tailored Assortments for Variety-Seeking/Avoiding Consumers’ on 22nd November
The talk will be delivered by Prof. Sumit M Kunnumkal, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad
13 November, 2023, Bengaluru: The Office of Research and Publications (R&P) at IIM Bangalore will host a research seminar on, ‘Strawberry or Vanilla this Week? How to Optimize Tailored Assortments for Variety-Seeking/Avoiding Consumers’, to be led by Prof. Sumit M Kunnumkal, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad (Decision Sciences area), at 2.30 pm on 22nd November 2023, at Classroom P-11.
Abstract: The researchers consider the problem of a retailer personalizing an assortment to a consumer who is variety-seeking or variety-avoiding, that is, less or more likely to buy the same product as in the previous period. To capture the consumer’s attitude towards variety, the researchers construct a model based on that of Givon (1984) and later modified by Feinberg et al. (1994). They first consider the single period problem where the retailer has to determine the optimal assortment to a consumer based on her previous purchase and her attitude towards variety. Although the assortment optimization problem is intractable in general, the researchers identify special cases where the optimal assortment can be determined efficiently. Moreover, they characterize the structure of the optimal assortment and compare it to the case where the consumer is variety neutral and makes choices according to the multinomial logit model. After that they consider the multi-period setting where the retailer makes tailored assortment decisions to a consumer who makes repeated purchases over time. They formulate the problem as a dynamic program and show that many of the structural properties from the single-period problem carry over to the multi-period case. It is observed that the retailer can lose substantial revenue if the consumer’s attitude towards variety is not considered while making the assortment decision. This is joint work with Dorothee Hohon (UTD), Ismail Kirci (UIUC) and Sridhar Seshadri (UIUC).
Speaker Profile: Dr. Sumit Kunnumkal is a Professor of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business. He holds a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University. He received his M S in Transportation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B Tech in Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He has previously taught at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University and has held visiting positions at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests lie in the areas of pricing and revenue management, retail operations, assortment planning and approximate dynamic programming. He has taught in the Post Graduate Programme, the Fellow Programme and various advanced management and executive education programmes at ISB.
Webpage Link: https://sites.google.com/view/sumitmkunnumkal/home?authuser=0
Research & Publications Office to host seminar on ‘Strawberry or Vanilla this Week? How to Optimize Tailored Assortments for Variety-Seeking/Avoiding Consumers’ on 22nd November
The talk will be delivered by Prof. Sumit M Kunnumkal, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad
13 November, 2023, Bengaluru: The Office of Research and Publications (R&P) at IIM Bangalore will host a research seminar on, ‘Strawberry or Vanilla this Week? How to Optimize Tailored Assortments for Variety-Seeking/Avoiding Consumers’, to be led by Prof. Sumit M Kunnumkal, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad (Decision Sciences area), at 2.30 pm on 22nd November 2023, at Classroom P-11.
Abstract: The researchers consider the problem of a retailer personalizing an assortment to a consumer who is variety-seeking or variety-avoiding, that is, less or more likely to buy the same product as in the previous period. To capture the consumer’s attitude towards variety, the researchers construct a model based on that of Givon (1984) and later modified by Feinberg et al. (1994). They first consider the single period problem where the retailer has to determine the optimal assortment to a consumer based on her previous purchase and her attitude towards variety. Although the assortment optimization problem is intractable in general, the researchers identify special cases where the optimal assortment can be determined efficiently. Moreover, they characterize the structure of the optimal assortment and compare it to the case where the consumer is variety neutral and makes choices according to the multinomial logit model. After that they consider the multi-period setting where the retailer makes tailored assortment decisions to a consumer who makes repeated purchases over time. They formulate the problem as a dynamic program and show that many of the structural properties from the single-period problem carry over to the multi-period case. It is observed that the retailer can lose substantial revenue if the consumer’s attitude towards variety is not considered while making the assortment decision. This is joint work with Dorothee Hohon (UTD), Ismail Kirci (UIUC) and Sridhar Seshadri (UIUC).
Speaker Profile: Dr. Sumit Kunnumkal is a Professor of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business. He holds a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University. He received his M S in Transportation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B Tech in Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He has previously taught at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University and has held visiting positions at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests lie in the areas of pricing and revenue management, retail operations, assortment planning and approximate dynamic programming. He has taught in the Post Graduate Programme, the Fellow Programme and various advanced management and executive education programmes at ISB.
Webpage Link: https://sites.google.com/view/sumitmkunnumkal/home?authuser=0