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Machine learning models play a key role for service providers looking to gain market share in consumer markets. However, traditional learning approaches do not take into account the existence of additional providers, who compete with each…
When energy customers schedule loads ahead of time, this information, if acquired by their energy retailer, can improve the retailer's load forecasts. Better forecasts lead to wholesale purchase decisions that are likely to result in lower…
What people buy is an important aspect or view of lifestyles. Studying people's shopping patterns in different urban regions can not only provide valuable information for various commercial opportunities, but also enable a better…
This work evaluates the effectiveness of spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for multi-store retail sales forecasting and compares their performance against ARIMA, LSTM, and XGBoost baselines. Using weekly sales data from 45 Walmart…
The Florence branch of an Italian supermarket chain recently implemented a strategy that permanently lowered the price of numerous store brands in several product categories. To quantify the impact of such a policy change, researchers often…
Fashion discounters face the problem of ordering the right amount of pieces in each size of a product. The product is ordered in pre-packs containing a certain size-mix of a product. For this so-called lot-type design problem, a stochastic…
Prototypical examples that best summarizes and compactly represents an underlying complex data distribution communicate meaningful insights to humans in domains where simple explanations are hard to extract. In this paper we present…
We consider the challenge of preference elicitation in systems that help users discover the most desirable item(s) within a given database. Past work on preference elicitation focused on structured models that provide a factored…
We study a model of retail agglomeration where consumers are more likely to visit zones with a higher concentration of shops. This agglomerative effect makes zones with many retailers more attractive. The spatial distribution of retailers…
We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…
This paper introduces an approach to reference class selection in distributional forecasting with an application to corporate sales growth rates using several co-variates as reference variables, that are implicit predictors. The method can…
We compare different approximations for the wait time in distribution networks, in which all warehouses use an (R,Q)-order policy. Reporting on the results of extensive computational experiments, we evaluate the quality of several…
Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data, aim at similar benchmarks, or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. We model the impact of…
Marketing is the way we ensure our sales are the best in the market, our prices the most accessible, and our clients satisfied, thus ensuring our brand has the widest distribution. This requires sophisticated and advanced understanding of…
One of the important factors of profitability is the volume of transactions. An accurate prediction of the future transaction volume becomes a pivotal factor in shaping corporate operations and decision-making processes. E-commerce has…
Time series data in the retail world are particularly rich in terms of dimensionality, and these dimensions can be aggregated in groups or hierarchies. Valuable information is nested in these complex structures, which helps to predict the…
Typical e-commerce platforms contain millions of products in the catalog. Users visit these platforms and enter search queries to retrieve their desired products. Therefore, showing the relevant products at the top is essential for the…
Supply and demand are two fundamental concepts of sellers and customers. Predicting demand accurately is critical for organizations in order to be able to make plans. In this paper, we propose a new approach for demand prediction on an…
It is difficult to decide upon the efficacy of an online sale simply from the discount offered on commodities. Different features have different influence on the price of a product which must be taken into consideration when determining the…
The complementarity and substitutability between products are essential concepts in retail and marketing. Qualitatively, two products are said to be substitutable if a customer can replace one product by the other, while they are…