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We have 1,000,000 customers. The cost of goods sold for each of them can be expressed as price A or price B.

Price A << Price B.

Price A and Price B are not linear to each other. In some cases B is 2 times as expensive, in some it is 100 times.

cost of all the customers on A is

min( (sum(A)/count(A)) , 100 ) * count(A) Effectively, the average cost of all the customers on A will be rounded up to 100 if it is less than 100.

There is no such restriction on B.

I would like to spend the least amount of money on their goods.

How do I maximize

cost=min( (sum(A)/count(A)) , 100 ) * count(A) + sum(B) I keep seeing this as a form of a dual knapsack problem, but I can't get it right ...

I'd be probably solving this in Python, most likely, although I doubt that matters much.

I've done manual analyses by assigning scores to x y z and filtering based upon that, I'm interested in more of a computational solution.

Any approaches to recommend?

Rizwan Kassim
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  • Possible resource : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17598397/methods-of-comparing-prices – Rizwan Kassim Oct 06 '13 at 02:47
  • I'm not sure if I understand your problem correctly. Can you give a small example to explain it clearly? – Abhishek Bansal Oct 06 '13 at 05:37
  • You have a choice of 2 prices for 200k different items. But it's not clear from your question what your model is for your profit, given a particular set of choices for prices. That makes it impossible to answer your question. – Paul Hankin Oct 06 '13 at 05:48
  • "I still have to pay $100", I assume you meant "I still have to pay atleast $100" because your individual bill maybe greater than $100 in which case I assume you will have to pay the actual bill amount. Also, do you have the data of actual usages for each customer for each of TV, data and voice? – Abhishek Bansal Oct 06 '13 at 06:16
  • I tried again here : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19455985/searching-for-the-best-fit-price-for-multiple-customers – Rizwan Kassim Oct 18 '13 at 17:47

1 Answers1

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Restated in a much easier way elsewhere.

Searching for the best fit price for multiple customers

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Rizwan Kassim
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  • .. this is not actually an answer to the question. – DSM Oct 18 '13 at 17:44
  • @RizwanKassim just click 'close' under the text of the question. It doesn't 'delete' it, but closes it so it won't show up for others anymore. – Tom Swifty Oct 18 '13 at 18:22