For nearly three centuries the spectacular rise and fall of the South Sea Company has gripped the public imagination as the most graphic warning to investors of the dangers of unbridled speculation. Yet history repeats itself and the same elemental forces that drove up the price of South Sea...

This paper investigates how to estimate the likelihood of a customer accepting a loan offer as a function of the offer parameters and how to choose the optimal set of parameters for the offer to the applicant in real time. There is no publicly available data set on whether customers accept the...