Forecasting prices in online auctions is important for both buyers and sellers. With good forecasts, bidders can make informed bidding decisions and sellers can select the right time and place to list their products. While information from other auctions can help forecast an ongoing auction, it...

This paper presents a novel intelligent bidding system, called SOABER (Simultaneous Online Auction BiddER), which monitors simultaneous online auctions of high-value fine art items. It supports decision-making by maximizing bidders' surpluses and their chances of winning an auction. One key...

Prerelease demand forecasting is one of the most crucial yet difficult tasks facing marketers in the $60 billion motion picture industry. We propose functional shape analysis (FSA) of virtual stock markets (VSMs) to address this long-standing challenge. In VSMs, prices of a movie's stock reflect...

As the online channel matures, many firms are finding that an understanding of how their online customers' preferences and choices vary across geographical markets can be very useful. In this paper, we propose a spatial multinomial model of customer choice and illustrate how spatial modeling of...

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a very popular optimization tool for mixture problems and in particular for model-based clustering problems. However, while the algorithm is convenient to implement and numerically very stable, it only produces local solutions. Thus, it may not...