Enterprise customer journeys are shaped not only by product experiences and marketing, but also by recurring resource-allocation decisions. In B2B go-to-market (GTM) organizations, territory carving determines which accounts receive seller coverage, which seller-account relationships are preserved, and how limited field capacity is distributed. Yet the process often remains manual, making it difficult to compare opportunities, value continuity, and evaluate tradeoffs among growth, balance, capacity, and feasibility. We present a production decision system for tradeoff-aware customer-to-seller allocation in enterprise GTM planning. It integrates three components: a multidimensional account-value layer that combines predictive signals to score opportunity; an observational continuity-valuation layer that estimates the cost of breaking seller-account relationships using a synthetic-control-style counterfactual framework; and a multi-objective optimization layer that allocates coverage to high-value accounts while considering continuity, opportunity balance, and operational constraints. Deployed as a scenario-based decision-support system, the framework enables planners to inspect and compare allocation tradeoffs. Historical backtesting shows that optimizer-generated scenarios substantially improve assignment compliance while maintaining comparable seller-level opportunity distribution. In production planning, adopted scenarios improved both assignment compliance and opportunity balance relative to the previous baseline. Directing scarce seller capacity toward higher-value accounts also offers incremental revenue potential at enterprise scale. The key contribution is an integrated, inspectable framework that turns territory carving into a governable decision process.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Overall framework for data-driven territory carving.
Figure 2. Continuity valuation using a synthetic-control-style counterfactual.
Balance gain
Continuity break
vs deployed plan
vs production
Continuity heavier
34%
-46%
Continuity heavy
71%
−10%
Production (selected)
94%
0% (ref.)
Balance heavy
95%
+10%
Balance heavier
95%
+19%
Table 1. Scenario frontier on the backtest. Imbalance reduction is measured against the deployed baseline plan; account reassignment is measured against the selected production scenario.
Evaluation area
What it assesses
Compliance
Adherence to eligibility, locked assignments, capacity limits, and business rules.
Account value
Capture of higher-quality accounts in recommended territories.
Balance
Distribution of opportunity across sellers.
Continuity
Preservation of valuable account-seller relationships.
Movement
Level of account reassignment and operational disruption.
Solver stability
Reliability of solutions within planning runtime constraints.
Table 2. Optimizer output evaluation dimensions.
Figure 3. Backtest comparison of optimizer-generated and historical territory plans on compliance rate.
Figure 4. Comparison of seller attainment distribution under optimizer-generated and historical territory plans.
Figure 5. Adaptive human-in-the-loop deployment workflow. Planning inputs drive an initial scenario generation; planners review and govern the recommendation, and re-optimization incorporates their edits, iterating between human review and the optimizer until a final territory plan is adopted.
Personal and organizational planning systems maintain two records that drift apart: what was planned (a task's effort budget) and what was done (a logged action's duration and description). Existing systems bridge them with an exclusive, all-or-nothing link that strands genuinely related but unlinked effort and reports false stalls on active goals. We formulate the bridge as a quasi-linear Fisher market: planned tasks are budget-constrained buyers, performed actions are divisible goods, and a fused text/structural/temporal signal sets each buyer's valuation. Two market instruments - a seller reserve price and a buyer cash option - yield conservation, a hard budget cap, and a provable junk filter as theorems. We extend the market with a concave completion utility discounting progress as a task nears its plan; standard convergence theory for the market's algorithm does not transfer here, resolved by a satiation-threshold fixed point with existence (Brouwer) and local uniqueness under an explicit diagonal-dominance condition, validated empirically on random and adversarial instances. A de-circularized, multi-seed benchmark - observed affinity corrupted independently of the scored ground truth - surfaces a genuine weak spot: the market's sharp, zero-entropy equilibrium is more sensitive to affinity noise than entropy-regularized optimal transport's permanently smoothed one. We resolve this with a one-parameter entropy-regularized generalization unifying the two, plus a noise-adaptive rule for its regularization strength. We report full reproducibility parameters, discuss limitations candidly, and relate the result to multi-touch attribution, optimal transport, and online Fisher-market algorithms.
Deployed decisions are often optimized once and retained because updates impose operational, regulatory, or switching costs. As operating conditions change, when should such decisions be re-optimized? We study this question for stochastic optimization when the objective's functional form is known but the decision maker's trade-offs are encoded by an unknown preference parameter. Standard distribution-shift tests are poorly aligned with this goal: they can flag detectable yet decision-irrelevant changes without determining whether the incumbent decision has become materially suboptimal. We propose RADAR (Regret-based Assessment of Decision Adequacy and Risk), a decision-focused framework that uses inverse optimization to infer latent preferences and tests the deployed decision's optimality gap under the current distribution. By targeting regret, RADAR ignores decision-irrelevant shifts while detecting changes that warrant re-optimization. We develop two-sample and sequential changepoint procedures and establish asymptotic guarantees for Type-I error and power. Across synthetic optimization problems, a semi-synthetic capacity allocation task, and police-zone planning, RADAR more reliably distinguishes harmful from harmless shifts than decision-agnostic alternatives.
Online marketplaces increasingly do more than simply match buyers and sellers: they route orders across competing sellers and, in many categories, offer ancillary fulfillment services that make seller inventory a source of platform revenue. We investigate how a platform can use intertemporal demand allocation to influence sellers' inventory choices without directly controlling stock. We develop a model in which the platform observes aggregate demand, allocates orders across sellers over time, and sellers choose between two fulfillment options, fulfill-by-merchant (FBM) and fulfill-by-platform (FBP), while replenishing inventory under state-dependent base-stock policies. The key mechanism we study is informational: by changing the predictability of each seller's sales stream, the platform changes sellers' safety-stock needs even when average demand shares remain unchanged. We focus on nondiscriminatory allocation policies that give sellers the same demand share and forecast risk. Within this class, uniform splitting minimizes forecast uncertainty, whereas any higher level of uncertainty can be implemented using simple low-memory allocation rules. Moreover, increasing uncertainty above the uniform benchmark requires routing rules that prevent sellers from inferring aggregate demand from their own sales histories. These results reduce the platform's problem to choosing a level of forecast uncertainty that trades off adoption of platform fulfillment against the inventory held by adopters. Our analysis identifies demand allocation as a powerful operational and informational design lever in digital marketplaces.
Rene Caldentey, Tong Xie
Booth School of Business, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637