Arranging the assortment to arouse choice: Effects of goal-relevant assortment organization on food choice and variety perceptions

Variety, Vice, and Virtue: How Assortment Size Influences Option Choice

Assortment size has been shown to influence whether consumers make a choice, but could it also influence what they choose? Five studies demonstrate that because choosing from larger assortments is often more difficult, it leads people to select options that are easier to justify. Virtues and utilitarian necessities are generally easier to justify than indulgences; consequently, choosing from la...

Assortment Optimization under General Choice

We consider the static assortment optimization problem – a central decision problem faced by operations managers that has been widely studied in the literature. The decision deals with finding the assortment of products (from a larger universe of products) that maximizes the expected revenue subject to a constraint on the size of the assortment. More concretely, if N = {1, 2, . . . , N} denotes...

Feature Complementarity and Assortment in Choice

This research argues that the purchase probability from a given choice set is contingent on the complementarity of the features differentiating its options. In particular, two types of features are distinguished: complementary features, which are characterized by the additivity of their utilities, and noncomplementary features, which are characterized by nonadditive utilities. In this context, ...

Assortment Planning in School Choice [Preliminary Draft]

In many public school systems across the US, school choice has become the preferred alternative to the traditional method of assigning each student to a neighborhood school. In a typical school choice system, each student submits a preference ranking for a set of schools called the student’s menu. The school board then assigns students to schools using the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance (DA) ...

How Assortment Size Influences Option Choice