Balancing Assortment Breadth vs. Depth when Stores have Limited Capacity
Sumit Kunnumkal
Indian School of Business
November 20, Friday
13:40 via Zoom
Integrating inventory and assortment planning decisions is a challenging task that requires comparing the value of demand expansion through broader choice for consumers, with the value of higher product availability. We develop a model for trading off these values in a setting with limited store capacities and inventory replenishment, two features missing in the literature. The exact analysis of the single product case allows us to develop an accurate approximation for the multi-product case, which incorporates the cost of higher availability in a tractable manner, and hence can be embedded in an optimization framework. Our solutions provide near-optimal performance and lead to breadth and depth that are increasing in store capacity. (Joint work with V. Martinez-de-Albeniz)
Sumit Kunnumkal is an Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business. He holds a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University. He received his M.S. in Transportation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his B.Tech. in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has previously taught at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University and has held visiting positions at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests lie in the areas of pricing and revenue management, retail operations, assortment planning and approximate dynamic programming. He has taught in the Post Graduate Program, the Fellow Program and various advanced management and executive education programs at ISB.