Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Counterfactual Inference for Consumer Choice Across Many Product
  Categories   This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among
discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category,
but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is
additive in the different categories. Her preferences about product attributes
as well as her price sensitivity vary across products and are in general
correlated across products. We build on techniques from the machine learning
literature on probabilistic models of matrix factorization, extending the
methods to account for time-varying product attributes and products going out
of stock. We evaluate the performance of the model using held-out data from
weeks with price changes or out of stock products. We show that our model
improves over traditional modeling approaches that consider each category in
isolation. One source of the improvement is the ability of the model to
accurately estimate heterogeneity in preferences (by pooling information across
categories); another source of improvement is its ability to estimate the
preferences of consumers who have rarely or never made a purchase in a given
category in the training data. Using held-out data, we show that our model can
accurately distinguish which consumers are most price sensitive to a given
product. We consider counterfactuals such as personally targeted price
discounts, showing that using a richer model such as the one we propose
substantially increases the benefits of personalization in discounts.

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The categories of this paper are: hep-th
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
33
The categories of this paper are: plasm-ph
31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
25
The categories of this paper are: patt-sol
3
The categories of this paper are: physics
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
35
The categories of this paper are: mtrl-th
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
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The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
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The categories of this paper are: solv-int
0
The categories of this paper are: hep-ph
2
The categories of this paper are: math