„It is the customer who determines what a business is." In the very sense of Drucker’s (1954) analysis, the single customer has come more deeply into the firm’s focus than ever. Firms are faced by an uninterrupted trend towards individualization in all areas of life, as new Delphi studies predict. Explanations may be found in the tendency towards an experience economy, the growing number of sin...

Online customer reviews represent an important source of aggregate product information. Today, these reviews compete for customer attention with the vast amount of other information presented on ecommerce websites, including product characteristics, alternative products, and context-based advertisements, among others. When customers’ ability to process this information is overloaded, valuable i...

Performing arts organizations aim to enrich their communities through the arts. To do this, they strive to match their performance offerings to the taste of those communities. Success relies on understanding audience preference and predicting their behavior. Similar to most e-commerce or digital entertainment firms, arts presenters need to recommend the right performance to the right customer a...

for constructive discussions and suggestions. I am also grateful to James O'Brien from IDC for his help with the data. Financial support from the LBS and ESRC is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are my own. Abstract This paper examines how information on the purchasing patterns of different customer segments can be used to more accurately evaluate the economic impact of mergers. Us...

On a shopping trip to a supermarket a customer may purchase a product in a given category and, if so, buys a particular brand. A previous paper by the authors models the brand choice part of this process. A multinomial logit model describes the selection of brand and size given that the customer makes a category purchase. Explanatory variables include store actions, such as price and promotion,...

The assortment optimization problem under the mixture of multinomial logit models is NPcomplete and there are different approximation methods to obtain upper bounds on the optimal expected revenue. In this paper, we analytically compare the upper bounds obtained by the different approximation methods. We propose a new, tractable approach to construct an upper bound on the optimal expected reven...