The selection of the most profitable customers in a customer database for targeted activities is often done based on observed behaviour in the past. Consequently, databases arising from the responses to, for example, direct mailings in the past are not random samples. When not all heterogeneity...

One of the aims of direct marketing in practice is to target the most profitable customers in the database at hand. This selection is often done based on observed behavior in the past. As a consequence, databases arising from the responses to direct mailings are not a random sample from all...

Being able to accurately predict what a customer will purchase next is of paramount importance to successful online retailing. Given the large assortments maintained by online retailers, scalability of the prediction method is just as important as its accuracy. In this paper we study scalable...

Binary choice models occur frequently in economic modeling. A measure of the predictive performance of binary choice models that is often reported is the hit rate of a model. This paper develops a test for the outperformance of a predictor for binary outcomes over a naive prediction method,...

This paper proposes a semiparametric estimator for single- and multiple index models. It provides an extension of the average derivative estimator to the multiple index model setting. The estimator uses the average of the outer product of derivatives and is shown to be root-N consistent and...