In today's turbulent business environment, customer retention presents a significant challenge for many service companies. Academics have generated a large body of research that addresses part of that challenge – with a particular focus on predicting customer churn. However, several other...

Several researchers have proposed models of buyer behavior in noncontractual settings that assume that customers are "alive" for some period of time and then become permanently inactive. The best-known such model is the Pareto/NBD, which assumes that customer attrition (dropout or "death") can...