Marketing and Data Science: Together the Future is Ours

The synergistic use of computer science and marketing science techniques offers the best avenue for knowledge development and improved applications. A broad area of complementarity between the typical focus in statistics and computer science and that in marketing offers great potential. The former fields tend to focus on pattern recognition, control and prediction. Many marketing analyses embrace these directions, but also contribute by modeling structure and exploring causal relationships. Marketing has successfully combined foci from management science with foci from psychology and economics. These fields complement each other because they enable a broad spectrum of scientific approaches. Combined, they provide both understanding and practical solutions to important and relevant managerial marketing problems, and marketing science is already very successful at obtaining unique insights from big data

CABARET Schemes for improved wave propagation and viscous flow modelling

PhD thesisThe dispersion improved Compact Accurately Boundary Adjusting high- REsolution Technique (CABARET) schemes are presented as an upgrade of the original CABARET for improved wave propagation modeling. The new modification retains many attractive features of the original CABARET scheme such as shock-capturing and low dissipation. It is simple for implementation in the existing CABARET codes and leads to greater accuracy for solving linear wave propagation problems. A non-linear version of the dispersion-improved CABARET scheme is introduced to deal with contact discontinuities and shocks efficiently. The properties of the new linear and nonlinear CABARET schemes are analyzed for numerical dissipation and dispersion error based on Von Neumann analysis. The properties of the new linear and nonlinear CABARET schemes are demonstrated for one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional flows. Furthermore, the viscous terms in the full three-dimensional CABARET unstructured Navier-Stokes solver have been updated from the vertex approach to the collocated approach, resulting in efficient computational time

An empirical analysis of shopping behavior across online and offline channels for grocery products: the moderating effects of household and product characteristics

We study the moderating effects of household (e.g., shopping frequency) and product (e.g., sensory nature) characteristics on household brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity across online and offline channels for grocery products. We analyze the shopping behavior of the same households that shop interchangeably in the online and offline stores of the same grocery chain in 93 categories of food, nonfood, sensory and nonsensory products. We find that households are more brand loyal, more size loyal but less price sensitive in the online channel than in the offline channel. Brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity are closely related to household and product characteristics. Light online shoppers exhibit the highest brand and size loyalties, but the lowest price sensitivity in the online channel. Heavy online shoppers display the lowest brand and size loyalties, but the highest price sensitivity in the online channel. Moderate online shoppers exhibit the highest price sensitivity in the offline channel. The online-offline differences in brand loyalty and price sensitivity are largest for light online shoppers and smallest for heavy online shoppers. The online-offline differences in brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity are larger for food products and for sensory products.This project is partially supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education Research Project R-317-000- 073-113 and the Government of Navarre and the Spanish Ministry of Science Research Project SEC2002- 04321-C02-02

The Effects of Sensitization and Habituation in Durable Goods Markets

We develop a model to study the impact of changes in price sensitivity on the firm as it introduces multiple generations of a durable product where unit costs are a convex function of quality. We incorporate the psychological processes of sensitization and habituation into a model of discretionary purchasing of replacement products motivated by past experience. When price sensitivity decreases with each purchase (sensitization), the myopic firm offers a higher quality product at a much higher price with each generation. When price sensitivity increases with each purchase (habituation), the myopic firm engages in price skimming. When sensitization is followed by habituation, the myopic firm eventually provides higher quality than the market is willing to pay for, leading to a steep drop-off in sales and profits. The actions of the forward-looking firm depend on the discount rate. A firm with a low discount rate builds its customer base before offering a higher quality and higher priced product. In contrast, a firm with a high discount rate quickly increases price and quality following the same path to falling profits of the myopic firm. These results provide insight into the firm and consumer behaviors underlying the phenomenon of 'performance oversupply' identified in the innovation literature