Firms use aggregate data from data brokers (e.g., Acxiom, Experian) and external data sources (e.g., Census) to infer the likely characteristics of consumers and thus better predict consumers' profiles and needs, unobtrusively. We demonstrate that the simple count method most commonly used in...

We revisit and test Salop and Stiglitz (1982) Theory of Sales. Equilibrium predictions are that higher consumer storage costs lead to: (1) higher average prices, (2) fewer promotions, and (3) shallower promotions. Empirical estimates of storage cost are developed for approximately 1,000...

Business ought to understand their customers' needs and wants, if they want to remain successful in a competitive market place. Therefore, this chapter introduces its readers to market research as tourism businesses continuously require information on their customers. In this light, a well...

We review applications of Bayesian methods to marketing problems. Key aspects of marketing applications include the discreteness of response or outcome data and relatively large numbers of cross-sectional units, each with possibly low information content. The use of informative priors including...

Bayesian methods have become widespread in the marketing literature. We review the essence of the Bayesian approach and explain why it is particularly useful for marketing problems. While the appeal of the Bayesian approach has long been noted by researchers, recent developments in computational...

This paper investigates the role of persuasion mechanisms in collective decision-making. A persuasion mechanism consists of a family of conditional distributions over the underlying state space and the generated noisy signals. A biased, perfectly informed sender adopts a persuasion mechanism to...

Hierarchical Bayes models free researchers from computational constraints and allow for the development of more realistic models of buyer behavior and decision making. Moreover, this freedom enables exploration of marketing problems that have proven elusive over the years, such as models for...

We develop a new method to sample from posterior distributions in hierarchical models without using Markov chain Monte Carlo. This method, which is a variant of importance sampling ideas, is generally applicable to high-dimensional models involving large data sets. Samples are independent, so...

In a typical sale model, retailers compete for informed consumers by changing prices in every period. Thus, if menu costs resist price adjustments, they prevent not only prices from equilibrating demands and supplies, but also retailers' competition. I investigate the effects of menu costs on...

While vertical firms dominate the fashion markets worldwide since years, only little research is done on vertical alliances between non-vertical retailer and manufacturing companies in this sector. These paper analyses vertical alliances from the perspective of 98 traditional fashion retailers...