Daily-deal selection for revenue maximization.

Daily-Deal Sites (DDS) like Groupon, LivingSocial, Amazon's Goldbox, and many more, have become particularly popular over the last three years, providing discounted offers to customers for restaurants, ticketed events, services etc. In this paper, we study the following problem: among a set of candidate deals, which are the ones that a DDS should feature as daily-deals in order to maximize its revenue? Our first contribution lies in providing two combinatorial formulations of this problem. Both formulations take into account factors like the diversification of daily deals and the limited consuming capacity of the userbase. We prove that our problems are NP-hard and devise pseudopolynomial -- time approximation algorithms for their solution. We also propose a set of heuristics, and demonstrate their efficiency in our experiments. In the context of deal selection and scheduling, we acknowledge the importance of the ability to estimate the expected revenue of a candidate deal. We explore the nature of this task in the context of real data, and propose a framework for revenue-estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our entire methodology in an experimental evaluation on a large dataset of daily-deals from Groupon.