Game Modeling Possibilities in Product Assortment Management
Authors: Vlasov D. A. , Karasev P. A. , Sinchukov A. V. 
Published: January 2025

Growing competition among domestic manufacturers under the pressure of sanctions requires special attention to the issues of product range optimization. In changing conditions, manufacturers are forced to constantly monitor sales, analyze data and optimize the product range, excluding ineffective types of products and adding new types that are in demand in the sales market.

Purpose of research: to identify the possibilities of game theory in managing the product range, to provide recommendations for its use in the process of forming an assortment policy. The relevance of the research topic is due to the need of manufacturers to improve the mechanisms for managing the range of manufactured products.

The following materials and methods of game modeling were used in the study: designing a set of players, designing a set of player strategies, quantitative assessment of the elements of the payoff matrix, techniques for reducing the degree of uncertainty, methods for choosing optimal strategies under conditions of complete and partial uncertainty, as well as generalizing the experience of using game models in the analysis of various economic situations.

The focus is on game modeling that complements the mathematical and statistical methods traditionally used to formulate an assortment policy: mathematical programming methods - the task of optimizing an assortment given resource constraints, such as budget and stocks of raw materials used in the production process; multi-criteria choice methods - the task of taking into account several criteria when making decisions on the product assortment, such as product quality, product price, product demand, etc.; statistical analysis methods (the task of analyzing available sales data and identifying trends - regression analysis to forecast demand for manufactured products, identify relationships between various factors, such as product demand and prices, marketing efforts, seasonality, etc.; cluster analysis to segment products and customers based on previously identified characteristics, such as customer preferences and age, as well as associative analysis to identify relationships between products - determining product groups that can be presented together in the assortment); methods of time series analysis and simulation modeling (the task of forecasting demand for products based on available sales data; the task of fictitious implementation of various assortment management scenarios and quantitative assessment of their consequences).

Results. Game models of product assortment management of the basic level (taking into account the presence of a product type in the formed assortment) and advanced level (taking into account not only the presence of a product type in the formed assortment, but also its quantity) were constructed, an approach to quantitative assessment of the consequences of decisions made to change the assortment of manufactured products was proposed. The sensitivity of the optimal strategy for forming the product assortment to the dynamics of the decision maker’s attitude to risk and the level of trust in information was established.

Conclusion. The scientific novelty of the study consists in developing an approach to managing the assortment of manufactured products, the basis of which is the justification of the optimality of the game strategy. The practical significance of the study lies in expanding the application of applied and research capabilities of game modeling to issues of managing the assortment of manufactured products, as well as improving the tools for analyzing the enterprise’s assortment policy (aspects of the width and depth of the assortment). Eight factors of the strategic assortment policy were identified and substantiated.