Jacob Feldman

Biography

My research has focused on the essential question that retailers ask themselves everyday, namely, which set of products should I offer to my customers so as to maximize revenue? This problem of finding the assortment of products that yields the largest expected revenue is commonly referred to as the assortment optimization problem. The difficulty in this problem is that the retailer must carefully balance the appeal of his or her assortment as a whole, and the relative appeal of the individual products which are the most profitable: adding a product to an assortment diversifies a retailer's display and thus increases his or her market share, but this additional product can cannibalize sales of the products that were previously a part of the assortment.

I am currently a Ph.D student at Cornell University in the Operations Research Department. I completed my undergraduate degree at Harvey Mudd College.