[mustntmumble]

Do you, or any other HN readers, know of any articles on how to solve the problem of working out the best Point of Sale checkout promotional offer?

If I have a set of retail promotional offers going such as:

Offer 1: buy two shirts from this set of shirts, and get a 50% discount

Offer 2: buy a shirt from this set of shirts, a jacket from this set of jackets, and a tie from this set of ties all for a set price of $99

Offer 3: all ties are on sale at half price

I'm trying to figure out if the google libraries linked above can be used to solve this problem, but I can't figure out how to convert the offers into values that can be used by the google library...

[joshuahutt]

This was one of the first problems I tackled as a developer. My naive approach was to calculate the values of the offers independently, pick the top one, and then continue to try to apply remaining offers. Obviously, it's not the optimal solution, but I thought it worked well for the problem, because people like thinking they got a really big discount, even if their total savings might be less.

[jonbaer]

Sounds more like a Slope One variant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slope_One