The deregulation of the European energy market, combined with emerging advanced capabilities of information technology, provides strategic opportunities for new knowledge-oriented services on the power grid. HOMEBOTS is the name we have coined for one of these innovative services: decentralized power load management at the customer side, automatically carried out by a ‘society’ of interactive h...

The advancement of hybrid energy resources such as solar and wind power leading to the emergence of customer owned grid. It provides an opportunity to regulars to obtain low energy costs as well as enabling the power supplier to regulate the utility grid. There is a need to develop smart systems that will automatically submit energy demand schedule and monitors energy price signals in real-time...

New arising technologies change the modes of interaction between companies and their customers. So-called self-service technologies (SSTs) allow integrating customers as active participants into companies’ business processes and thereby are expected to generate not only more efficient processes but also positive effects on customer satisfaction. As some customers do not consider their integrati...

We introduce a dynamic pricing model for a monopolistic company selling a perishable product to a finite population of strategic consumers (customers who are aware that pricing is dynamic and may time their purchases strategically). This problem is modeled as a stochastic dynamic game in which the company’s objective is to maximize total expected revenues, and each customer maximizes the expect...

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...

Marketing research has identified several benefits of dynamic pricing strategies in the retail industry. However, today’s retailers are limited to apply them in real-time to customer needs as corresponding pricing services provided by smart product infrastructures have not been adopted so far. In addition, dynamic pricing strategies rely on a business service ecosystem of retailers, suppliers, ...

The automation of the Utility Enterprise is changing; objects are in to stay. This paper examines how electric utilities will automate to meet the competitive market. Deregulation has not only reshaped the organizational structure, but it is also reshaping the implementation of automation. A Distribution Management System must now be viewed as part of a technical enterprise and must exchange da...

In this work, we examined the surprising value consumers attach to getting a bargain. Past research has largely understood this phenomenon in terms of the impact discounts have on perceptions of fairness. However, the evidence for this explanation is inconclusive due to a number of viable alternatives as well as issues relating to construct and external validity. The experiments we report here ...

Churn happens when a customer leaves a brand or stop using its services. Brands reduce their churn rates by identifying and retaining potential churners through customer retention campaigns. In this paper, we consider the problem of classifying micro-posts as churny or non-churny with respect to a given brand. Motivated by the recent success of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in word represent...

Dealing with sensitive data has been the focus of much of recent research. On one hand data disclosure may incur some risk due to security breaches, but on the other hand data sharing has many advantages. For example, revealing customer transactions at a grocery store may be beneficial when studying purchasing patterns and market demand. However, a potential misuse of the revealed information m...