This paper documents the existence of the direct and indirect (via word-of-mouth) effects of service quality on new customer acquisition, usage and retention using behavioral data from the launch of a new video on demand type service. For this technology, service quality - the quality of the...

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....

Conflicts between marketing and sales functions concerning customer acquisition process in business-to-business firms hurt profits. Marketing claims that sales disregards qualified leads; sales questions lead quality. To address such conflicts and avoid threats to profits, we consider several...

The present research develops and tests a theory explaining how customers respond to failed service recoveries (i.e., double deviations). This work offers three novel and important conclusions. First, inferences about a firm's motive (negative vs. positive) mediate the impact of perceptions of...

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...