Challenges and opportunities in high-dimensional choice data analyses

Modern businesses routinely capture data on millions of observations across subjects, brand SKUs, time periods, predictor variables, and store locations, thereby generating massive high-dimensional datasets. For example, Netflix has choice data on billions of movies selected, user ratings, and geodemographic characteristics. Similar datasets emerge in retailing with potential use of RFIDs, online auctions (e.g., eBay), social networking sites (e.g., mySpace), product reviews (e.g., ePinion), customer relationship marketing, internet commerce, and mobile marketing. We envision massive databases as four-way VAST matrix arrays of Variables?×?Alternatives?×?Subjects?×?Time where at least one dimension is very large. Predictive choice modeling of such massive databases poses novel computational and modeling issues, and the negligence of academic research to address them will result in a disconnect from the marketing practice and an impoverishment of marketing theory. To address these issues, we discuss and identify the challenges and opportunities for both practicing and academic marketers. Thus, we offer an impetus for advancing research in this nascent area and fostering collaboration across scientific disciplines to improve the practice of marketing in information-rich environment.     

Augmenting discrete-choice data to identify common preference scales for inter-subject analyses

Discrete-choice experiments are commonly used to measure subjects?? preference structures and are often preferred to other measurement methods because they better align with actual choice behavior and avoid some of the well-documented biases inherent in alternative elicitation methods. A limitation of discrete-choice methods is the loss of inter-subject comparability because preference estimates are invariant to linear transformations necessitating indentifying constraints that remove a common, between-subjects utility scale. This constraint limits the application of discrete-choice results to situations where within-subject comparisons are meaningful. They enable one to sort options for each subject but not to sort subjects according to the relative intensity of their preferences. This paper uses auxiliary data to recover a common preference scale for between-subject comparisons. The model combines discrete-choice data with ratings data while adjusting for response biases due to method effects. The joint model moves the identification constraints from the sub-model for the discrete-choice data to the sub-model for the ratings data. The proposed methodology is complementary to willingness-to-pay computations when studies lack price or its economic foundation is untenable.     

Inferring Market Structure from Customer Response to Competing and Complementary Products

We consider customer influences on market structure, arguing that market structure should explain the extent to which any given set of market offerings are substitutes or complements. We describe recent additions to the market structure analysis literature and identify promising directions for new research in market structure analysis. Impressive advances in data collection, statistical methodology and information technology provide unique opportunities for researchers to build market structure tools that can assist real-time marketing decision-making.