Calibrating an Imperfect Auxiliary Predictor for Unobserved No-Purchase Choice

2026-02-12

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge that firms face in accurately estimating market size and consumer preferences when only transaction data are available, as unobserved non-purchase behaviors—such as switching to competitors or forgoing purchase altogether—introduce significant bias. To mitigate this, the paper proposes two calibration approaches: first, a regression-based method that consistently recovers non-purchase probabilities under affine miscalibration in logit space; and second, a rank-based calibration algorithm that operates under a weak monotonicity assumption and comes with finite-sample error guarantees. The theoretical analysis cleanly disentangles the effects of auxiliary predictor quality from utility estimation error on downstream decision performance. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed methods substantially improve the accuracy of non-purchase probability estimation, enhance revenue in product assortment optimization, and enable robust fusion of multiple predictors.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Calibration & Uncertainty Quantification
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Decision/Utility Theory
• Search and Optimization: Non-convex Optimization

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking

Abstract

Firms typically cannot observe key consumer actions: whether customers buy from a competitor, choose not to buy, or even fully consider the firm's offer. This missing outside-option information makes market-size and preference estimation difficult even in simple multinomial logit (MNL) models, and it is a central obstacle in practice when only transaction data are recorded. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary market-share, aggregated, or cross-market data. We study a complementary setting in which a black-box auxiliary predictor provides outside-option probabilities, but is potentially biased or miscalibrated because it was trained in a different channel, period, or population, or produced by an external machine-learning system. We develop calibration methods that turn such imperfect predictions into statistically valid no-purchase estimates using purchase-only data from the focal environment. First, under affine miscalibration in logit space, we show that a simple regression identifies outside-option utility parameters and yields consistent recovery of no-purchase probabilities without collecting new labels for no-purchase events. Second, under a weaker nearly monotone condition, we propose a rank-based calibration method and derive finite-sample error bounds that cleanly separate auxiliary-predictor quality from first-stage utility-learning error over observed in-set choices. Our analysis also translates estimation error into downstream decision quality for assortment optimization, quantifying how calibration accuracy affects revenue performance. The bounds provide explicit dependence on predictor alignment and utility-learning error, clarifying when each source dominates. Numerical experiments demonstrate improvements in no-purchase estimation and downstream assortment decisions, and we discuss robust aggregation extensions for combining multiple auxiliary predictors.

Problem

• outside-option
• miscalibration
• no-purchase estimation
• auxiliary predictor
• transaction data

Innovation

• calibration
• no-purchase choice
• auxiliary predictor
• assortment optimization
• miscalibrated black-box