This research investigates whether charities can enhance fundraising effectiveness by increasing donors’ sense of agency. This article introduces two strategies that allow donors to target individual charitable projects, either via the choice options (targeting-via-options) or via the suggested donation amounts (targeting-via-amounts). A large-scale field experiment involving more than 40,000 prospective donors manipulates the ability to control the allocation of the charity’s resources a...

Moderation analysis investigates the conditions under which variables affect outcomes. In marketing, it is common that at least one of the target moderation variables is latent and measured by multiple indicators with measurement error. This paper compares six methods for latent moderation analysis: multi-group, means, corrected means, factor scores, product indicators, and latent product. It reviews their use in marketing research, describes their assumptions, and compares their performance ...

Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability, or their responsiveness to a retention offer. However, both approaches ignore that some customers contribute more to the profitability of retention campaigns than others. This study addresses this problem by defining a profit-based loss function to predict,...

Field experimentation has become a well-established practice to estimate individual treatment effects. In recent years, the Active Learning (AL) literature has developed methods to optimize the design of field experiments and reduce their cost. In this paper, we propose a novel AL algorithm for individual treatment effect estimation that works in batch mode for cases where the outcomes of an intervention are not immediate. It uniquely combines Expected Model Change Maximization and Bayesian A...

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 equally important aspects of managing retention have not received similar level of attention, leaving many managerial problems not completely solved, and a program of academic research not completely align...

The customer lifetime value combines into one construct the transaction timing, spending and dropout processes that characterize the purchase behavior of customers. Recently, the potential relationship between these processes, either at the individual customer level (i.e. intra-customer correlation) or between customers (i.e. inter-customer correlation), has received more attention. In this paper, we propose to jointly unveil the direction and intensity of these correlations using copulas. We...

Polymorphisms of the OXTR gene affect people’s social interaction styles in various social encounters: carriers of the OXTR GG, compared to the OXTRAA/AG in general, are more motivated to interact socially and detect social salience. We focus on sales professionals operating in knowledge intensive organizations. Study 1, with a sample of 141 sales people, shows that carriers of the OXTR GG allele, compared to the OXTR AA/AG allele, a...

Prior international segmentation studies have been static in that they have identified segments that remain stable over time. This paper shows that country segments in new product growth are intrinsically dynamic. We propose a semiparametric hidden Markov model to dynamically segment countries based on the observed penetration pattern of new product categories. This methodology allows countries to switch between segments over the life cycle of the new product, with t...

In this article, we discuss the state of the art of models for customer engagement and the problems that are inherent to calibrating and implementing these models. The authors first provide an overview of the data available for customer analytics and discuss recent developments. Next, the authors discuss the models used for studying customer engagement, where they distinguish the following stages: customer acquisition, customer development, and customer retention. Finally, they discuss severa...

Prior marketing literature has overlooked the role of regulatory regimes in explaining international sales growth of new products. This paper addresses this gap in the context of new pharmaceuticals (15 new molecules in 34 countries) and sheds light on the effect regulatory regimes have on new drug sales across the globe. Based on a time-varying coefficient model, we find that differences in regulation substantially contribute to cross-country variation in sales. One of the regulatory constra...