The current invention provides a method, system and computer program
product for designing a catalog with optimized placement of items. Past
user transactions are used to estimate the effect of nature and placement
of an item on the response of users to the catalogs in terms of items
clicked on or items purchased. These estimations are used to optimize the
placement of items in a catalog in order to maximize the gains for a
merchant specified objective, which can be in terms of revenues, sales or
the number of clicks. Various stochastic and deterministic optimization
functions are used for the purpose of optimization.