Operations Research | July 2023
new bounds on the gap between the optimal expected revenue and an upper bound based on a
certain continuous relaxation of the assortment problem. Our bounds can be tighter than the
existing bounds in the literature and provide more insight into the key drivers of tractability
for the assortment optimization under the nested logit model. Moreover, our bounds scale
with the nest dissimilarity parameters and we recover the well-known tractability results for
the assortment optimization problem under the multinomial logit model when all the nest
dissimilarity parameters are equal to one. We extend our results to cardinality constrained
assortment problem where there are constraints that limit the number of products that can
be offered within each nest.
Sumit Kunnumkal is a Professor and Area Leader of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business (ISB). He holds a PhD in Operations Research from Cornell University. He received his MS in Transportation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.Tech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Professor Kunnumkal has previously taught at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, and has held visiting positions at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests lie in the areas of pricing and revenue management, retail operations, assortment planning, and approximate dynamic programming.
At ISB, he has taught in the PGP programme, the Fellow programme, and various Advanced Management and Executive Education programmes.
