Optimal Exploration of New Products under Assortment Decisions
We study online learning for new products on a platform that makes capacity-constrained assortment decisions on which products to offer. For a newly listed product, its quality is initially unknown, and quality information propagates through social learning: when a customer purchases a new product and leaves a review, its quality is revealed to both the platform and future customers. Since reviews require purchases, the platform must feature new products in the assortment ("explore") to generate reviews to learn about new products. Such exploration is costly because customer demand for new products is lower than for incumbent products. We characterize the optimal assortments for explorati...
| Authors | Jackie Baek, Atanas Dinev, Thodoris Lykouris |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SI |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 May 2026 |
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