PhD Thesis Defense Presentation: Jean-Sebastien Matte

Jean-Sébastien Matte, a doctoral student at McGill University in the Operations Management area will be presenting his thesis defense entitled:

ECOWISR

(Excessive Consumption, Overproduction, and Waste: Impact Solutions through Reduction): The case of the fast fashion industry

Thursday, May 29, 2025, at 10:00 a.m.
(The defense will be conducted in hybrid mode)

Student Committee Co-chairs: Professor Mehmet Gumus

Please note that the Defence will be conducted in hybrid mode. If you wish to participate, please contact the PhD office and we will provide you with the defence details.

Abstract

The fashion industry faces environmental challenges, including overproduction, waste, and impactful production processes. This thesis examines how a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour can help retailers develop more attractive assortments and adopt sustainable practices. By studying and integrating richer behavioural models to assortment decision, this thesis provides data-driven insights to reduce waste and environmental impacts, as well as targeted policy recommendations that promote sustainability and collaborative action across the industry. In the first manuscript, in collaboration with a large European fast fashion retailer, we examine how assortment variety affects customer choices. Using a large clickstream dataset, we model assortment variety as a bipartite graph along three main dimensions: styles, colours, and graph density. Using a richer choice model, we identify three main customer segments with varying preferences for economic and variety variables. Our findings emphasize the need for retailers to balance offering a wide variety with efficient management and accounting for heterogeneity in customer preferences. The second manuscript addresses confusion and the lack of regulation around environmental impact in the fashion industry. By combining experimental choice data to measure preferences to a product line and pricing optimization model, and counterfactual simulation, it studies how a retailer can design and price a product line that balances profitability and environmental impact. We find that Price is the primary driver of consumer choice with limited sensitivity to environmental attributes. However, our counterfactual simulation shows that increased consumer awareness on environmental attributes can raise the importance and willingness-to-pay for environmental attributes, reducing the profitability-environmental trade-off. Our findings suggest that gradual policies are needed to bridge the gap between consumer intentions and behaviour, and support retailer’s shift toward more sustainable practices.