Computational studies on two-stage stochastic programming problems indicate that aggregate models have better scale-up properties than disaggregate ones, though the threshold of breaking even may be high. In this paper we attempt to explain this phenomenon, and to lower this threshold. We present the on-demand accuracy approach of Oliveira and Sagastizábal in a form which shows that this approa...

Aggregate demand models typically assume that consumers choose between all available products. Since consumers may be unwilling to search across every store in a given market for a particular item, this assumption is problematic when product assortments vary across stores. Using supermarket scanner data for five product categories we demonstrate that approximately one third of products have lim...