We consider the problem of devising incentive strategies for viral marketing of a product. In particular, we assume that the seller can influence penetration of the product by offering two incentive programs: a) direct incentives to potential buyers (influence) and b) referral rewards for customers who influence potential buyers to make the purchase (exploit connections). The problem is to dete...

We study a pricing problem where buyers with non-uniform demand purchase one of many items. Each buyer has a known benefit for each item and purchases the item that gives the largest utility, which is defined to be the difference between the benefit and the price of the item. The optimization problem is to decide on the prices that maximize total revenue of the seller. This problem is also call...

We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this setting, we consider the following questions: What fraction of the optimum social welfare does a revenue maximizing solution achieve? Are there pricing mechanisms ...

Although, the ISO quality management system is often perceived to be marketing tool within the manufacturing industry its implications on the design-sensitive wooden furniture industry remain unknown. Therefore, a survey of 500 foreign furniture buyers was conducted at the Malaysian International Furniture Fair (MIFF) to establish the status and perceived benefits of the ISO-certification in th...

a r t i c l e i n f o The customer lifetime value combines into one construct the transaction timing, spending and dropout processes that characterize the purchase behavior of customers. Recently, the potential relationship between these processes , either at the individual customer level (i.e. intra-customer correlation) or between customers (i.e. inter-customer correlation), has received more...

The traditional direct marketing paradigm implicitly assumes that there is no possibility of a customer purchasing the product unless he receives the direct promotion. In real business environments, however, there are “voluntary buyers” who will make the purchase even without marketing contact. While no direct promotion is needed for voluntary buyers, the traditional response-driven paradigm te...

A key feature of high-traffic e-commerce sites is the ability to offer a predictive and personalized service to Web users. Visitors to online stores are potential buyers but in reality very few visits finally result in a product purchase. Thus, it would be especially valuable for online retailers to predict buyers against browsers based on some session features (e.g. session duration, the numbe...

Sales of a brand are determined by measures such as how many customers buy the brand, how often, and how much they also buy other brands. Scanner panel operators routinely report these ‘‘brand performance measures’’ (BPMs) to their clients. In this position paper, we consider how to understand, interpret, and use these measures. The measures are shown to follow well-established patterns. One is...

Optimal timing for airline ticket purchasing from the consumer’s perspective is challenging principally because buyers have insufficient information for reasoning about future price movements. This paper presents a model for computing expected future prices and reasoning about the risk of price changes. The proposed model is used to predict the future expected minimum price of all available fli...

W characterize the effect of anticipated regret on consumer decisions and on firm profits and policies in an advance selling context where buyers have uncertain valuations. Advance purchases trigger action regret if valuations turn out to be lower than the price paid, whereas delaying purchase may cause inaction regret from missing a discount or facing a stockout. Consumers whom we describe as ...