EXPRESS: Robust Demand Estimation with Customer Choice-Based Models for Sales Transaction Data

Abstract

We develop a novel statistical method to estimate customer choice among a firm’s portfolio of offerings when the firm cannot directly observe customers who choose not to purchase any product. This censored demand problem is prevalent in many industries such as hotels, airlines, and retail. Although several methods have been proposed to address this problem, they require some level of data aggregation across arrivals and/or choice sets, which results in information loss and potentially biased estimates. Therefore, they have limited applicability in an environment where the prices of a firm’s portfolio of offerings vary over time and sometimes even across different customers. Our proposed method combines several desirable properties, which makes it a better fit for realistic datasets where the available choice sets or attributes of the products in the choice sets change over time. We consider two additional types of information for identification of our model parameters: 1) additional mild assumptions on the customers’ utility function, and 2) external information about a firm’s market share. We then develop a robust estimation procedure that accounts for inaccuracies in either information type and let the data determine the best approach. Through Monte-Carlo simulations, we show that our approach provides promising predictions of customer choice behavior when compared with other generally used methods and clearly outperforms those methods in scenarios where the product prices change frequently over time. Utilizing a real hotel transaction dataset provided by Oracle Labs, we further illustrate the improved estimation accuracy of our method compared to benchmark methods. Relative to existing approaches for estimating customer choice-based models, our proposed methodology better suits environments employing dynamic pricing and personalized offering practices, such as hospitality or online retailing.