讲座题目：The Optimization of Inbound Marketing: Assortment Planning, Pricing Management, and Paid Advertising

  讲座内容摘要：We consider the problem of assortment and pricing for retailers who offer substitutable products in two stages, for example, due to limited space or diversifying consumers' cognitive costs. Because customers are not aware of the existence of the products in the second stage upon arriving, the products in the first stage serve  as a purpose to captivate customers until the second stage. We develop a two-stage choice model, under which a customer only proceeds to the second stage when she does not choose the outside option in the first stage and the customer in the second stage makes a choice among all products in two stages. We find that the assortment problem is NP-complete. Thus, we give  a tight $1/2$-approximation algorithm  and also devise a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme.  We give the optimal policy for the joint assortment and pricing problem and show an interesting insight that, a optimal product-invariant price in the second stage  should be first lowered and then raised as the total product attractiveness of the second stage increases.  We estimate choice models using a real data set on JD.com and show that the choice model with product unawareness may provide a better fit on consumer choice than the multinomial logit model and a mixture of multinomial logit models. Furthermore, ignoring product unawareness may lead to a significant loss of revenue.

  主讲人简介：东南大学经济管理学院执行院长、教授、博导；兼任中国运筹学会行为运筹与管理分会副理事长，中国管理科学与工程学会协同创新与管理研究会副主任。主要研究方向为数字化运营管理，品类与库存管理。主持国家自然科学基金优秀青年科学基金、国家自然科学基金重点项目在内的多项国家级和省部级项目。在国内外重要核心期刊发表学术论文40余篇，包括Production and Operations Management、Management

Science、Operations Research等管理科学领域顶级期刊。