Demand response is nowadays considered as another type of generator, beyond just a simple peak reduction mechanism. A demand response service provider (DRSP) can, through its subcontracts with many energy customers, virtually generate electricity with actual load reduction. However, in this type of virtual generator, the amount of load reduction includes inevitable uncertainty, because it consi...

Customer segmentation is a process that divides a business’s total customers into groups according to their diversity of purchasing behavior and characteristics. The data mining clustering technique can be used to accomplish this customer segmentation. This technique clusters the customers in such a way that the customers in one group behave similarly when compared to the customers in other gro...

A consumer’s purchase decision making process is very complex. It is obvious that the set of product functional features has a major role in the purchase decision. However, for a same product, users may have different assessments. So it seems that other factors than product functional characteristics play a role in decision making. Frequently, customers are segmented based on characteristics su...

Recent studies have shown that as demand becomes irregular and complex (i.e., lumpy), a possible approach for managing such uncertainty is to collect information directly from customers. This implies that the sales units have to move closer to customers, analyse their likely requirements, and collect quantitative and structured data as well as qualitative and subjective insights. However, as in...

supply chain network design decisions are among the strategic decisions of supply chain management which play significant role on the efficient performance of the supply chain. however, there are two challenging factors which may have great impact on the supply chain performance. these factors are on the one hand disruptions and their attendant damages and on the other hand uncertain nature of ...

Cloud computing promises the flexible delivery of computing services in a pay-as-you-go manner. It allows customers to easily scale their infrastructure and save on the overall cost of operation. However Cloud service offerings can only thrive if customers are satisfied with service performance. Allowing instantaneous access and flexible scaling while maintaining the service levels and offering...

We study the efficient allocation of buyers in the presence of recommender systems. A recommender system affects the market in two ways: (i) it creates value by reducing product uncertainty for the customers and hence (ii) its recommendations can be offered as add-ons, which generates informational externalities. We investigate the impact of these factors on the efficient allocation of buyers a...

A (customer) contact center is a collection of resources providing an interface between a service provider and its customers. The classical contact center is a call center, containing a collection of service representatives (reps) who talk to customers over the telephone. In a call center, the service reps are supported by quite elaborate information-and-communication-technology (ICT) equipment...

Services like FedEx charge up-front fees but reimburse customers for delays. However, lead time pricing studies ignore such delay refunds. This paper contributes to filling this gap. It studies revenue-maximizing tariffs that depend on realized lead times for a provider serving multiple time-sensitive customer types. We relax two key assumptions in the standard model since Naor (1969). First, c...

Although Advance Selling and Probabilistic Selling differ in both motivation and implementation, we argue that they share a common characteristic—both offer consumers a choice involving buyer uncertainty. We develop a formal model to examine the general economics of purchase options that involve buyer uncertainty, explore the differences in buyer uncertainty created via these two strategies, an...