Pricing, assortment, and inventory decisions under nested logit demand and equal profit margins
研究了在嵌套Logit消费者选择模型下，可替代产品的品类、库存与定价联合决策问题，假设所有产品利润率相等，提出了一个基于泰勒近似的启发式方法，数值实验显示该方法能产生高质量解。
We consider the interdependent decisions on assortment, inventory and pricing of substitutable products that are differentiated by some primary and secondary attributes captured by a nested logit consumer choice. We examine a newsvendor-type setting with several products competing for demand over a single selling season. We assume that all products have equal profit margins. The demand has a multiplicative-additive structure where both variance and coefficient of variation depend on the common profit margin, which adds to the model applicability at the expense of tractability. Under a Taylor series-type approximation, we show that the expected profit is unimodal in the common margin of products in a given assortment. Then, we compare the optimal profit margin to the case under ample inventory, which allows understanding the effect of inventory on pricing. We also study the optimal assortment problem under exogenous pricing. We show that the classic result on the optimality of popular sets holds under tight approximations of the profit function. We finally propose a heuristic for jointly deciding on assortment, pricing, and inventory decisions, which assumes equal profit margins of products, and exploit popular sets only. Our detailed numerical study shows that this equal-margin heuristic produces high quality solutions.