Consumer behaviour at pure Internet players has been analysed thoroughly in earlier work. When it comes to retailers with multiple distribution channels, however, new behaviour patterns can be observed. Given the fact that multi-channel retailing is much more common than Internet-only, the analysis of consumer behaviour in a multi-channel context constitutes a challenge for the deeper understan...

A significant portion of the electricity network capacity is built to run only a few days a year when demand peaks. As a result, expensive power generation plants and equipment costing millions of dollars are sitting idle most of the time, which increases costs for everyone. We present randomized load control, a simple distributed approach for scheduling smart appliances. Randomized load contro...

The amount of products and services available over the Internet increases significantly and it soon becomes beyond users ability to analyze and compare them. At the same time the number of potential customers available via the Internet also increases dramatically and starts to be beyond the service providers ability to perform efficient targeted marketing. A possible way for relaxing the above-...

The paper considers the use of a Consumer Price Index (CPI) for three possible purposes: (1) as a Cost of Living Index (COLI); i.e., as a measure of the relative cost of achieving the standard of living when facing two different sets of prices for the same group of commodities; (2) as a consumption deflator; i.e., the price change component for a decomposition of a value ratio into price and qu...

In the present era of information explosion and media influence, these advertisements play a major role in changing the settled perception or thinking, which is otherwise called attitude, of the consumer and also the consumption pattern of the society in general. Across the world, celebrities have been used for a wide variety of brands. The crescendo of celebrities endorsing brands has been ste...

BACKGROUND Accurate assessment of the difficulty of consumer health texts is a prerequisite for improving readability. General purpose readability formulas based primarily on word length are not well suited for the health domain, where short technical terms may be unfamiliar to consumers. To address this need, we previously developed a regression model for predicting "average familiarity" with ...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model for debt repayment behaviors of new customers in the credit card market. We treat customer decisions of whether to be delinquent or not and of how much to pay conditional on deciding not to be delinquent as two separate but possibly correlated decisions and thus view the amount repaid by a delinquent consumer as a censored observation. We assume that th...

This article provides a review of the economics literature on oligopoly price discrimination by purchase history. Two basic models of repeated purchases with two firms and two periods are discussed in detail, one in which firms produce a homogenous good ex ante but where there is ex post product differentiation due to consumer switching costs, and another in which firms’ products are differenti...

Until recently, brand identities were built by the firms via brand-image advertising. However, the flourishing of consumer communication weakened the grip of firms on their brands. The interaction between advertising and consumer communications and their joint impact on brand identity is the focal point of this paper. We present a model in which consumer preference for functional attributes may...