Technical Note: Mathematical Properties of the Optimal Product Line Selection Problem Using Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis
研究基于选择型联合分析的产品线选择问题的数学性质，发现其特殊结构可用标准数学规划代码高效求解实际规模问题，对从事产品线优化和定价的学者有参考价值。
Selecting and pricing product lines is an essential activity in many businesses. In recent years, quantitative approaches for such tasks have been gaining in popularity. One often-employed method is to use data from traditional rankings/ratings-based conjoint analysis and attack the product line selection problem with enumeration or heuristics. In this note, we employ a relatively new methodology known as choice-based conjoint analysis (to model customer preferences) and investigate its mathematical properties when used to model the product line selection problem. Despite some inherent limitations resulting from its aggregated formulation, we show that this more parsimonious conjoint approach has some special mathematical properties that lead to an efficient optimal algorithm to tackle the product line/price selection problem. As a result, problems of realistic size can be solved efficiently using standard, commercially available mathematical programming codes.