Patent ID: 7257544

Claim:
A method comprising the computer implemented steps of: storing historical information about demand behavior associated with different sizes of styles of items of commerce; aggregating the historical information for one or more classes, each class associated with one or more styles and each class containing historical information about demand behavior associated with sizes for one or more styles associated with the class; generating one or more size profiles for each class from historical information associated with the class; generating a distribution of the size profiles for each class from the one or more size profiles generated for the class; and generating a size assortment recommendation for each class from the distribution of size profiles for that class and on one or more objectives with respect to purchase or allocation decisions about assortments of the different sizes, the one or more objectives including an objective function, the objective function identifying a vector of proportions of sizes that represents a maximum expected value of a realized profit minus a weighting factor times a customer service function, the customer service function being a function of a number of time periods between total stock-out of a style and a first time period that any size of that style stocks out.