Assortment planning for vertically differentiated products under a consider-then-choose model

Consider-then-choose models, borne out by empirical literature in marketing and psychology, note that customers follow a two-stage procedure to choose among alternatives. In this paper, we consider the assortment optimization problem of a retailer who manages a category of vertically differentiated products under customers’ consider-then-choose behavior. We characterize some structural results of the optimal assortment and find that the problem can be solved as the shortest path problem. Also, we develop an efficient algorithm to identify an optimal assortment.