Managers are very interested in word-of-mouth communication because they believe that a product's success is related to the word of mouth that it generates. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. First, how does one gather the data?...

Among the more prominent truisms in marketing are 80/20 type laws, e.g., 20 percent of the customers account for 80 percent of the purchases. These kinds of statistics indicate a certain degree of in customer purchases; i.e., the extent to which a large portion of the product's total purchases...

Customer base analysis is concerned with using the observed past purchase behavior of customers to understand their current and likely future purchase patterns. More specifically, as developed in Schmittlein et al. (1987), customer base analysis uses data on the frequency, timing, and dollar...

In recent years, many U.S. and Japanese firms have adopted Quality Function Deployment (QFD). QFD is a total-quality-management process in which the “voice of the customer” is deployed throughout the R&D, engineering, and manufacturing stages of product development. For example, in the first...

A simple, dynamic selection procedure is proposed, based on conditional, expected profits using Markov chain models with memory. The method is easy to apply, only frequencies and mean values have to be calculated or estimated. The method is empirically illustrated using a data set from a...

We propose and test a new approach for modeling consumer heterogeneity in conjoint estimation based on convex optimization and statistical machine learning. We develop methods both for metric and choice data. Like hierarchical Bayes (HB), our methods shrink individual-level partworth estimates...

In increasingly competitive and deregulated service environments, telecommunications service providers are interested in using advertising to stimulate usage. Measuring response in telephone usage to advertising presents difficulties because the effects are likely to be small, and the usage...

Normative models typically suggest that prices rise in periods of high demand and cost. However, in many markets, prices fall when demand or costs rise. This inconsistency occurs because the normative models assume that competitive intensity does not change with demand and cost conditions over...

Polyhedral methods for choice-based conjoint analysis provide a means to adapt choice-based questions at the individual-respondent level and provide an alternative means to estimate partworths when there are relatively few questions per respondent, as in a Web-based questionnaire. However, these...

In this paper we develop a general class of dynamic brand choice models, called (LB) models, which are consistent with the theory of random utility maximization of consumer choice behavior. The underlying random utility process is Markov, and the inter-temporal evolution of the...