Newest papers

AI-Mediation in Retail Markets: Revenue Effects and Assortment Optimization

Omar El Housni, Marouane Ibn Brahim · 2026 · arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2610.12917 · cited by 0 works (OpenAlex) · open-access PDF

Chinese

AI购物助理越来越多地影响消费者考虑的产品。我们在AI调解下研究零售分类规划,在那里零售商选择了目录,AI中介者形成了面向客户的短列表,而客户根据多元逻辑模型从该短列表中选择。我们考虑到确定性调解,在其中AI遵循固定细分特定的排名,以及基于Plackett-Luce模型的斯托哈斯特调解。从经验上讲,我们构建了从AI模型中领先的产品排名数据集,估计Plackett-Luce排名模型,并评估他们在持有分类上的预测性能。将这些估计与研究合成客户偏好结合起来,我们发现,对AI调解的会计可以实质上改变最佳的分类和客户收入。通过测试的能力配置

Machine translation (Meta M2M100); the English original follows.

Abstract

AI shopping assistants increasingly influence which products consumers consider. We study retail assortment planning under AI mediation, where a retailer chooses a catalog, an AI intermediary forms a customer-facing shortlist, and the customer chooses from that shortlist according to a multinomial logit model. We consider both deterministic mediation, in which the AI follows a fixed segment-specific ranking, and stochastic mediation based on the Plackett-Luce model. Empirically, we construct a dataset of product rankings from leading AI models, estimate Plackett-Luce ranking models, and evaluate their predictive performance on held-out assortments. Combining these estimates with synthetic customer preferences, we find that accounting for AI mediation can materially change optimal assortments and revenue. Across the tested capacity configurations, ignoring mediation yields mean revenue losses between 2.52% and 11.37% relative to the PL optimum. A much simpler deterministic plug-in, based only on the ordering of fitted AI utilities, performs substantially better, with mean losses of at most 0.53%. Motivated by this performance, we study assortment optimization under deterministic mediation. We characterize its computational complexity and show that, for any fixed number of customer segments, the problem admits a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme.

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Topics: Ranking (information retrieval), Revenue, Multinomial logistic regression, Product (mathematics), Mediation, Econometrics

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