edge in terms of costs. In such an environment, a successful company wanting to survive and gain a competitive advantage must provide an acceptable bundle of customized services that satisfy customers’ needs. Despite the Internet’s obvious benefits as a new communication medium—such as targetability, trackability, deliverability, flexibility, and interactivity—Internet advertising gives the sam...

Motivated by overcoming the existing utility-based choice modeling approaches, we present a novel conceptual framework of multidimensional network analysis (MNA) for modeling customer preferences in supporting design decisions. In the proposed multidimensional customer–product network (MCPN), customer–product interactions are viewed as a socio-technical system where separate entities of ‘custom...

In electronic commerce web sites, recommender systems are popularly being employed to help customers in selecting suitable products to meet their personal needs. These systems learn about user preferences over time and automatically suggest products that fit the learned model of user preferences. Traditionally, recommendations are provided to customers depending on purchase probability and cust...

The Simple Plant Location Problem is well known in the literature: it consists in deciding which facilities to open among a set of potential nodes and allocating a set of customers to the open facilities in such a way that the total cost is minimum, allocation process which is carried out by the locator. However, customers may be free to choose the facility they will be allocated to. This fact ...

Identifying customers’ preferences is a challenging task with significant practical implications for online shopping. Current methods often put considerable burden on the customers through such methods as questioning, so the process could benefit from a more accurate and less intrusive estimation of how customers weight product attributes, particularly in the initial purchasing phase. Our goal ...

Conjoint analysis has received considerable attention as a technique for measuring customer preferences through utility tradeoffs among products and services. This paper shows how the method can be applied to the area of software architecture to analyze architectural tradeoffs among quality attributes. By eliciting customers utilities through conjoint analysis, software engineers can identify a...