INTRODUCTION The lifetime value of a customer is an important and useful concept in interactive marketing. Courtheaux (1986) illustrates its usefulness for a number of managerial problems—the most obvious if not the most important being the budgeting of marketing expenditures for customer acquisition. It can also be used to help allocate spending across media (mail vs. telephone vs. television)...

As a response to an overall high and persistent unemployment rate during the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, the German Federal Employment Agency underwent several reforms. One of the most important reforms, the reform of the organisational structure of the Federal Employment Agency, comprised an adjustment of the business model and a reorganisation of placement processes. From 2...

Currently, the World Wide Web is mostly composed of isolated and loosely connected "data islands". Connecting them together and retrieving only the information that is of interest to the user is the common Web usage process. Creating infrastructure that would support automation of that process by aggregating and integrating Web data in accordance to user’s personal preferences would greatly imp...

This research demonstrates the usefulness of self-organizing maps (SOM) as an intuitive visual rendering of a globalization phenomenon. We propose a systematic neural-network-based segmentation scheme for identifying and subsequently profiling transnational segments based on consumers’ desired benefits. In the study, SOMs are used in grouping survey respondents from 16 countries in the Asia-Pac...

While a user’s preference is directly reflected in the interactive choice process between her and the recommender, this wealth of information was not fully exploited for learning recommender models. In particular, existing collaborative filtering (CF) approaches take into account only the binary events of user actions but totally disregard the contexts in which users’ decisions are made. In thi...

There is evidence of research in various fields that has relevance to the examination of competence requirements for managing in interorganizational networks, However, research to date is limited in its potential application to managing supply in inter-organisational networks and particularly so when those networks relate to public sector services. This empirical paper builds on prior research ...

As the Internet spreads widely, it has become easier for companies to obtain and utilize valuable information on their customers. Nevertheless, many of them have difficulty in using the information effectively because of the huge amount of data from their customers that must to be analyzed. In addition, the data usually contains much noise due to anonymity of the Internet. Consequently, extract...

Although a regional leader, Internet banking in Saudi Arabia is yet to be fully utilised as a value-adding tool to improve customer relationships and achieve cost advantages. The aim of this study was to identify the factors that encourage customers to adopt online banking in Saudi Arabia. The research constructs were developed based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and incorporated som...

eBay has integrated Skype (a public voice over IP application) chat and voice into hundreds of categories on eBay sites globally. By integrating Skype in the marketplace, eBay sellers have the option of including Skype functionality to their eBay listings. This fosters more consumer to consumer (c2c) communication, in which eBay sellers can provide better customer care and build trust with buye...

In this paper, energy trading for the distributed smart grid architecture is projected as an incomplete information game — a viewpoint that contrasts from all the existing pieces of literature available on the broader issue of energy management in smart grid. The incomplete information is considered as the real-time demand and price to grid and customers, respectively, due to the packet loss in...