Joint ORIE/CAM Colloquium: Omar El Housni (Cornell Tech) - Joint Assortment Optimization and Customization: On the Value of Personalized Assortments

Description

Online retailers have access to a tremendous amount of browsing and purchasing customer data. As a result, in addition to picking the assortment of products they carry, online retailers can display a customized assortment of products to each customer based on what is known about the preferences of the customer. In this talk, we study a joint customization and assortment optimization problem under a mixture of MNL models. A firm faces customers of different types, each making a choice according to a different MNL model. In the first stage, the firm picks an assortment of products to carry subject to a cardinality constraint. In the second stage, a customer of a certain type arrives into the system. Observing the type of this customer, the firm customizes the assortment that it carries by, possibly, dropping products from the assortment. The problem arises, for example, in online platforms, where retailers commit to a selection of products before the start of the selling season, but they could potentially customize the displayed assortments for each customer type. We study the complexity of this class of problems, present tight bounds on the value of customization, and design novel approximation algorithms. In our computational experiments, we demonstrate the value of customization by using a dataset from Expedia.

Bio:
Omar El Housni is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech in Operations Research and Information Engineering. His research revolves around decision-making under uncertainty where he aims to design robust and efficient algorithms for a wide range of dynamic optimization problems with applications in revenue management and matching platforms. Omar spent few internships as a research and data scientist at Amazon and Uber where he contributed to the design and implementation of data-driven optimization models for matching and retailing platforms. El Housni’s holds a Bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from École Polytechnique (France), and a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Columbia University.