Capacitated assortment and price optimization under the multinomial logit model

We consider an assortment and price optimization problem where a retailer chooses an assortment of competing products and determines their prices to maximize the total expected profit subject to a capacity constraint. Customers' purchase behavior follows the multinomial logit choice model with general utility functions. This paper simplifies it to a problem of finding a unique fixed point of a single-dimensional function and visualizes the assortment optimization process. An efficient algorithm to find the optimal assortment and prices is provided. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.