Within analytical customer relationship management (CRM), customer acquisition models suffer the most from a lack of data quality because the information of potential customers is mostly limited to socio-demographic and lifestyle variables obtained from external data vendors. Particularly in this situation, taking advantage of the spatial correlation between customers can improve the predictive...

F often have to make their production decisions under conditions of demand uncertainty. This is especially true for product categories such as automobiles and technology goods where the lead time needed for manufacturing forces firms to make production decisions well in advance of the selling season. Once the firm has produced the goods, the available production volume affects the firm’s subseq...

Forest products are commodities and subject to cyclical trends; yet resource-hungry countries offer exporters a period of sustained growth for those with the right products. Products have their distinctive requirements, e.g., finishing timber (colour, stability), structural (strength stiffness, stability), paper (fibre length and tear strength). The failure to incorporate such key properties in...

The increased awareness of environmental sustainability has led to increasing attention closed loop supply chains (CLSC). main objective the CLSC is capture values from end-of-life (EOL) products in a way that ensures business be economically and environmentally sustainable. challenge complexity occurrs due closing loop. At same time, considering stochastic variables will increase realism obtai...

W e consider a setting in which consumers experience distinct instances of need for a durable product at random intervals. Each instance of need is associated with a random utility and the consumers are differentiated according to the frequency with which they experience such instances of need. We use our model of consumer utility to characterize the firm’s optimal strategy of whether to sell, ...

In this study, we analyze a dynamic pricing problem in which the demand is interdependent over time and the customers are heterogeneous in their purchasing decisions. The customers are grouped into different classes depending on their purchase probabilities and the customer classes evolve over time depending on the demand realizations at every period, which are a function of the prices set by t...

This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming model for a closed-loop supply chain network design problem in the context of modular structured products in which the reverse network involves several types of recovery options. It accounts for uncertainty in the quality status of the return stream, modeled as binary scenarios for each component in the reverse bill of materia...

Real annual consumption growth has averaged about 3.7% between 1998 Q1 and 2003 Q3—well above real average annual GDP growth of about 2.6% during that period. (2) Chart 1 shows that the buoyancy of consumer spending can be entirely accounted for by strong growth in durable and semi-durable goods expenditure (henceforth referred to as 'durable spending' unless otherwise specified). Since 1998 Q1...

In this paper, we develop a two-sector DSGE model with infrequent purchases of durable goods and use it to address the following three issues. Does this model help explain the recent weak recovery? Can this model help resolve the absence of co-movement between durable and non-durable consumption? Is the dynamic behavior of this model similar with that of the (durable goods) stock adjustment-cos...