We study a product-line price optimization problem with demand given by a discrete mixed multinomial logit (MMNL) model. The market is divided into a finite number of market segments, with product demand in each segment governed by the multinomial logit (MNL) model. We show that the concavity property with respect to the choice probability vector shown for the MNL model breaks down under MMNL even for entirely symmetric price sensitivities. In addition, the equal markup property identified for the MNL model no longer holds under MMNL, suggesting that heterogeneity in customer population justifies non-equal-markup pricing. In this paper, we characterize the profit function under MMNL as the sum of a set of quasiconcave functions and present efficient optimization algorithms. We demonstrate the application of our methods using data from Intel Corporation. Our results show that the optimal prices exploit segment differences through redistribution of sales and profit among customer segments. In addition, we use our methods to generate the profit-share efficient frontier, helping the firm to set prices that effectively balance these two measures. The tools developed in this research function in three important ways at Intel: (1) they provide a new alternative for market share prediction among Intel products for different customer segments, adding to the suite of independent demand forecasting tools; (2) they optimize product prices based on segment-specific customer preferences revealed through sales data, a capability that Intel’s current pricing tools include only heuristically; (3) they quantify the trade-off between profit and market share, adding a new decision support capability to the company. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0675 .

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For the British book trade, one of the major by-products of the eighteenth-century advent of a commodity culture was an upswing in the intensity of its advertising efforts. Chief among the new marketing practices was the use of puffery, or insider reviewing, to create hype for new publications. So naturalized had puffery become by the early nineteenth century that many authors saw nothing ethically remiss in arranging for themselves or friends to review their own works. In fact, at some point in his or her career, nearly every major author of the Romantic period bene�ted from reviews penned by friends and literary allies. By the late 1820s, puffery had become so ubiquitous and shameless that several leading writers and critics, including Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay, blamed corrupt reviewing practices for killing the nation's literary tradition. The recent slump of the literary book trade, it was widely argued, was less the product of the �nancial "Crash of 1826" than of the vitiation of society's tastes by a corrupt, self-interested reviewing establishment.

Nicholas Mason is assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University. His publications include volume 1 of Pickering and Chatto's British Satire, 1785-1840 series and articles on Victorian theories of drunkenness and Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. He is finishing a book on the relationship between the advertising and literary systems of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain.

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