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Discrete-choice models are used in economics, marketing and revenue management to predict customer purchase probabilities, say as a function of prices and other features of the offered assortment. While they have been shown to be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Hanzhao Wang , Zhongze Cai , Xiaocheng Li , Kalyan Talluri

In this paper, we study the joint product sequencing and pricing problem faced by many online retailers such as Amazon. We assume that consumers' purchase behavior can be explained by a ``consider-then-choose'' model: they first form a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Shaojie Tang , Jing Yuan

We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Reza Alijani , Siddhartha Banerjee , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Kamesh Munagala , Kangning Wang

Stochastic choice-based discrete planning is a broad class of decision-making problems characterized by a sequential decision-making process involving a planner and a group of customers. The firm or planner first decides a subset of options…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-20 Jiajie Zhang , Yun Hui Lin , Gerardo Berbeglia

We introduce the refined assortment optimization problem where a firm may decide to make some of its products harder to get instead of making them unavailable as in the traditional assortment optimization problem. Airlines, for example,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-02-08 Gerardo Berbeglia , Alvaro Flores , Guillermo Gallego

In our problem, we are given access to a number of sequences of nonnegative i.i.d. random variables, whose realizations are observed sequentially. All sequences are of the same finite length. The goal is to pick one element from each…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Aristomenis Tsopelakos , Olgica Milenkovic

We study a continuous and infinite time horizon counterpart to the classic prophet inequality, which we term the stationary prophet inequality problem. Here, copies of a good arrive and perish according to Poisson point processes. Buyers…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Kristen Kessel , Amin Saberi , Ali Shameli , David Wajc

We introduce the \textit{prophet inequality with uncertain acceptance} model, in which a decision maker sequentially observes a sequence of independent options, each characterized by a value $x_i$ and an acceptance probability $p_i$, both…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Emile Martinez , Felipe Garrido-Lucero , Umberto Grandi , Sebastian Pérez-Salazar

We explore a multiple-stage variant of the min-max robust selection problem with budgeted uncertainty that includes queries. First, one queries a subset of items and gets the exact values of their uncertain parameters. Given this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-07 Xiaoyu Chen , Marc Goerigk , Michael Poss

Assortment optimization is a fundamental challenge in modern retail and recommendation systems, where the goal is to select a subset of products that maximizes expected revenue under complex customer choice behaviors. While recent advances…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Miao Lu , Yuxuan Han , Han Zhong , Zhengyuan Zhou , Jose Blanchet

We study a variant of the single-choice prophet inequality problem where the decision-maker does not know the underlying distribution and has only access to a set of samples from the distributions. Rubinstein et al. [2020] showed that the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Tomer Ezra

Motivated by applications in e-retail and online advertising, we study the problem of assortment optimization under visibility constraints, that we refer to as APV. Here, we are given a universe of substitutable products and a stream of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-18 Theo Barre , Omar El Housni , Marouane Ibn Brahim , Andrea Lodi , Danny Segev

In the rapidly evolving landscape of retail, assortment planning plays a crucial role in determining the success of a business. With the rise of sponsored products and their increasing prominence in online marketplaces, retailers face new…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Shaojie Tang , Shuzhang Cai , Jing Yuan , Kai Han

We study the classic single-choice prophet inequality problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\varepsilon)$-competition complexity of different types of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Johannes Brustle , José Correa , Paul Dütting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Victor Verdugo

We study a pricing problem where a seller has $k$ identical copies of a product, buyers arrive sequentially, and the seller prices the items aiming to maximize social welfare. When $k=1$, this is the so called "prophet inequality" problem…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Shuchi Chawla , Nikhil Devanur , Thodoris Lykouris

We study the prophet inequality, a fundamental problem in online decision-making and optimal stopping, in a practical setting where rewards are observed only through noisy realizations and reward distributions are unknown. At each stage,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Jung-hun Kim , Vianney Perchet

Competition complexity formalizes a compelling intuition: rather than refining the mechanism, how much additional competition is sufficient for a simple mechanism to compete with an optimal one? We begin the study of this question in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Eugenio Cruz-Ossa , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Victor Verdugo

We study the problem of dynamic assortment personalization with large, heterogeneous populations and wide arrays of products, and demonstrate the importance of structural priors for effective, efficient large-scale personalization.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-03 Nathan Kallus , Madeleine Udell

Selecting which products to display and at what prices is a central decision in retail and e-commerce operations. In many applications, these two choices must be made jointly under limited display capacity and uncertain customer demand. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-22 Yunfan Zhang , Yuxuan Han , Hongyu Shan , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. A gambler is sent values in an online fashion, sampled from an instance of independent distributions, in an adversarial, random or selected order, depending on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Giordano Giambartolomei , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn , Raimundo Saona