Application of Optimal Control Theory in Marketing: What Is the Optimal Number of Choices on a Shopping Website?

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

Publication Title

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology

Volume

34

Issue

3

First page number:

307

Last page number:

315

Abstract

There have been some recent interests in making websites responsive to the dynamic behavior of users. We present a method for applying the steps of optimal control theory to internet shopping platforms. The information rate is a state variable to maximize and the rate of change in number of options available to the consumer is our control variable to minimize. We apply optimal control theory to identify the optimal number of options. We specify and solve the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimal control for a class of objective functions, which gives a nonlinear two-point boundary value problem.

Keywords

Consumer behavior; Control theory; Dynamic programming; Teleshopping; Web sites

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