We study the equilibrium effects of mergers between firms with brand portfolios and brand loyal customers for pricing and profitability. We find that the "merger paradox" (Salant, Switzer and Reynolds 1983) is absent in these markets. The acquisition of brand portfolios can be profit enhancing...

Marketing is an art to attract and retain customers, but not to any but profitable customers. Unfortunately, organizations often understand that 20 to 40 percent of their customers are unprofitable. Also, many organizations report the fact that their most profitable customers are not the ones...

We study the optimal customer-acquisition and customer-retention decisions over an infinite planning horizon of the representative firm in a monopolistically competitive industry. Both the long-term and short-term equilibria of the industry are characterized by a constant optimal retention rate....

The price discrimination literature typically makes the assumption of no consumer arbitrage. This assumption is increasingly violated in the digital economy, where coupons are traded with increased frequency online. In this paper, we analyze the welfare impacts of coupon trading using a modified...

There is growing interest in "customer-based corporate valuation," explicitly tying the value of a firm's customer base to its financial valuation. While much progress has been made in building a well-validated customer-based valuation model for contractual (or subscription-based) firms, there...

We study the optimal customer-acquisition and customer-retention decisions of the representative firm in a dynamic competitive industry. We find that the optimal per-customer retention effort depends positively on customer profitability and is constant over time. The endogenous effective...

We study the structure of optimal customer acquisition and customer retention strategies in an infinite horizon model of a firm in a competitive industry. We examine the effects of changes in customer profitability, density of competition, and discount rate on the optimal allocation of marketing...

We consider the problem of optimal allocation of the marketing budget between customer acquisition and customer retention by a firm over the trade cycle. In line with the Schumpeterian idea of creative destruction, we find that under perfect capital markets customer retention increases with the...

Dynamic customer targeting is a common task for marketers actively managing customer relationships. Such efforts can be guided by insight into the return on investment from marketing interventions, which can be derived as the increase in the present value of a customer's expected future...

We consider a dynamic oligopoly on the beer market and study the differential effects of switching costs on product prices, market shares, and profits. Our demand estimation results show large differences in brand loyalty, and switching costs across customer income segments and beer brands. Our...