More and more data about consumer-behaviour is becoming available through the use of database systems and electronic-banking systems. In this paper we describe a NN-based technique to extract some useful information from a database holding data about customers of an insurance-company. Using this NN, we try to learn more about the needs and wishes that lead consumers towards speciic behaviour, s...

Vehicle routing variants with multiple depots and mixed fleet present intricate combinatorial aspects related to sequencing choices, vehicle type choices, depot choices, and depots positioning. This paper introduces a dynamic programming methodology for efficiently evaluating compound neighborhoods combining sequence-based moves with an optimal choice of vehicle and depot, and an optimal determ...

In recent years, marine cultural tourism, an emerging tourism mode, has become more and more popular among tourists, and demonstrates broad market prospects. However, Chinese marine cultural tourism is still in the development and growth stage, and the level of customer satisfaction is uneven. The improvement of the customer satisfaction level is conducive to meeting customers’ demands in marin...

Customer integration has many recognised advantages, but also entails negative side effects that may impair the success of innovative activities. These negative side effects have not yet been sufficiently investigated. Whereas some may occur within the entire early innovation phase, others are likely to affect only few sub-phases. Each sub-phase, defined in a slightly new way as compared with e...

We consider a revenue management model for pricing a product line with several customer segments under the assumption that customers’ product choices are determined entirely by their reservation prices. We highlight key mathematical properties of the maximum utility model and formulate it as a mixed-integer programming problem, design heuristics and valid cuts. We further present extensions of ...

Recent studies have shown that most of our purchasing choices and decisions are the result of a careful analysis of the advantages and disadvantages and of affective and emotional aspects. Psychological literature recognizes that the emotional conditions are always present and influence every stage of decision-making in purchasing process. Consumers establish with company brands an overall emot...

We investigate analytical cost distributions in the setting of a dynamic stochastic scheduling problem where customers are served from a central location within some given time-frame, for the case where customer locations are uniformly distributed on the boundary of the unit circle. Two distance metrics are considered and analytical expressions for the distribution of the resulting costs are de...

Based on a comprehensive data set of German railway customers we analyze consumers’ choices and particularly subsequent changes of two-part pricing contracts (loyalty cards). In a competing risks framework, we simultaneously estimate effects on three types of contractual events: cancellations, upgrades, and downgrades. Focusing on customer relationship management (CRM) practices, we find severa...

Cloud computing is a multi-billion business, with more than 100 cloud service providers [1] vying for supremacy. Businesses are overwhelmed with choices and tradeoffs. In this paper we offer a qualitative and quantitative assessment of leading cloud service providers (CSPs) to guide small and medium businesses (SMBs) in their choice of CSP. Our qualitative study of usability, reliability, and c...

This article proposes that direct marketing does not need to have a direction (i.e. that of the firm seeking out customers). Effort spent on seeking customers could also be spent on compelling customers to seek out the firm, through increased product choices. Applying information economics into marketing, the paper provide examples as well as principles on how to design products that also assis...