Patent ID: 8195527

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for evaluating product substitutions along multiple criteria in response to a sales opportunity, comprising: determining a customer propensity to estimate attractiveness of a substitute product to a customer based on one or more first attributes; determining a seller propensity to estimate attractiveness to a seller of selling the substitute product based on one or more second attributes; and combining, by a processor, the customer propensity and the seller propensity to find a plurality of substitute products, the customer propensity determined to include at least C j,j′ =g(P j ,P j′ )−τ 1 h(Q j ,Q j′ )−τ 2 f( υ j , υ j′ ), wherein g(P j ,P j′ ) captures a price difference between an initial customer choice and a substitute product, h(Q j ,Q j′ ) provides that the substitute product does not have a poor quality by penalizing a choice of a component that has a lower quality than that chosen by the customer in a same commodity group, f( υ j′ , υ j′ ) provides that the substitute product has limited changes in configuration compared to the customer's initial choice by penalizing choosing a component in the substitute product that is not in the customer's initial choice and by penalizing a component in the customer's initial choice that is absent in the substitute, and wherein τ 1 and τ 2 are normalization constants.