Designing Layouts for Sequential Experiences: Application to Cultural Institutions

Abstract

A fundamental issue faced by experience providers--ranging from retail to culture--is displaying a collection of items for physical and digital interactions. The arrangement of the exhibits in different locations, which we call the layout, affects the visitors' choices over time and space, thereby driving their engagement with the offered experience. In a collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum (Netherlands), we develop a predict-then-optimize framework to inform such operational decisions. First, we propose a sequential choice model, called Pathway MNL, that represents visitor activity as a sequence of conditional logit outcomes influenced by the layout. Estimation on large-scale visitor activity log recorded on multimedia guides uncovers significant relationships between visitors' choices and layout distances, artwork characteristics, and various contextual features. Counter-intuitively, in response to more congestion, visitors interact with more exhibits, including less prominent artworks. Our model predicts the next visitor transition with an out-of-sample accuracy of 63%. We test the predictive accuracy of our model against several benchmarks and modified layouts from natural experiments. Finally, we formulate the layout optimization problem, where the goal is to assign artworks to different locations to maximize the expected length of visitors' paths. We establish a strong inapproximability result for this new optimization setting. Our simulations suggest that optimized layouts might lift visitor engagement by improving proximity and retention exerted by the layout.

Keywords: Customer paths, Sequential choice, Assignment problem, Cultural sector operations