Consideration Sets Based Hierarchical Product Configurator Design: A Theoretical Analysis

Configurators, also known as product configuration systems, play a crucial role in engaging customers and capturing their specific requirements for product specifications. However, customers often have diverse preferences, tastes, and needs, making it challenging to find a compromise among existing offerings. To address this issue, companies have expanded the range of product variants available to customers. While this provides more options, it can also overwhelm customers during the configuration process, leading to confusion and decreased satisfaction. To tackle this challenge, we propose a hierarchical product configuration method that progresses from a general to a more specific level. Initially, the wide range of choices is narrowed down to a small set of representative configurations, allowing us to identify customer preference categories. This subset of configurations is referred to as the consideration set. Subsequently, the detailed configuration is refined within this subset, ensuring that the final product aligns with the customer's preferences. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this hierarchical approach outperforms existing prevailing methods in terms of computational complexity, and thus addresses the issue of excessive choices. By simplifying the decision-making process and providing customers with a manageable set of options, this method reduces confusion and enhances customer satisfaction during the product configuration procedure.