Department of Industrial Engineering & Decision Analytics [Joint IEDA/ISOM seminar] - Consumer Choice Modeling – Temporal Tree and Beyond
Consider the case of a customer choosing none or one of several products offered. We will focus on characterizing the random choices of a representative customer as a random set function. Monotonicity or partial monotonicity of this function will lead to a collection of models progressing from rational (temporal tree) model to completely irrational (beyond temporal tree) consumer choice models. Sufficient and necessary condition on the (marginal) probability distribution of a Bernoulli set function for its monotonicity will allow us to characterize the level of irrationality (beyond rationality) of consumer choice probabilities. Spatial versus temporal view of consumer choice modeling will be also considered and the interplay between them will be demonstrated through temporal tree. Relationship of temporal tree model to key models that have been used and proposed in the literature to represent consumer choice (random utility, rank list, consideration set, consideration set–rank list, etc.) and consumer choice probabilities (attraction, exponomial, Markov chain, etc.) will be explored. This is based on the joint work with Annabelle Feng (Purdue University) and Mengying Xue (University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei).
Professor Shanthikumar joined the Krannert faculty in 2009. Prior to coming to Purdue, he was a Chancellor's Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in integrated interdisciplinary decision making, model uncertainty and learning, production systems modeling and analysis, queueing theory, reliability, scheduling, semiconductor yield management, simulation stochastic processes, and sustainable supply chain management. He has written or co-written more than 250 papers on these topics. He is a co-author (with John A. Buzacott) of the book Stochastic Models of Manufacturing Systems and a co-author (with Moshe Shaked) of the books Stochastic Orders and Their Applications and Stochastic Orders.