MANAGING PRODUCT VARIETY

Professor Jayashankar M. Swaminathan
Kenan-Flagler Business School
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

As firms try to cater to increasing customization needs, they
have to figure alternative ways for managing product variety. My
research in the last few years has been concentrated on understanding
some of the alternative strategies through development of mathematical
models for them and their analysis. In this talk, I will concentrate on
one such approach that deals with downward substitution of products. In
particular, the problem can be formulated as a stochastic integer
program with recourse and we develop simple yet effective heuristics for
the problem.