Papers by Rabikar Chatterjee
Management Science, Apr 1, 2018
We develop and test a new methodology that assigns geographical units (such as ZIP codes) to mark... more We develop and test a new methodology that assigns geographical units (such as ZIP codes) to market segments by simultaneously considering bases of segmentation, such as customer attitudes and needs, such that the resulting segments display a high level of spatial concentration. Such concentrated segments are managerially desirable because of the logistical and administrative efficiencies created by implementing spatially concentrated segment-level strategies. The suggested approach captures spatial dependence flexibly while allowing us to identify managerially actionable segments that effectively balance homogeneity and spatial concentration. An illustrative empirical application demonstrates how the results can be utilized to derive consumer insights for actionable segmentation strategies. A Monte Carlo simulation and an assessment of the quality of the segments obtained from the empirical application support the value of the proposed spatially dependent segmentation method. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
International Journal of Research in Marketing, Dec 1, 2008
This research focuses on the allocation of available hospital resources to different disease type... more This research focuses on the allocation of available hospital resources to different disease types to better serve the needs of patients. The proposed method examines a network of hospitals in a geographical area and determines the proportion of resources that each hospital should devote to different disease classes. The objective is to maximize the customer's utility (specifically, speed of access to medical care) rather than private profit. The approach accounts for the spatio-temporal pattern of disease incidence within the geographic area, and it incorporates the driving distance to a hospital as well as the types of roads in determining travel time. The application focuses on the Greater Los Angeles area, consisting of 525 ZIP codes. Results show a significant shortage of available bed-days for diseases related to socioeconomic status, especially in the center-city area.
Decision Support Systems, 2022
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
Daily deals have been very popular among both online shoppers and businesses seeking to attract c... more Daily deals have been very popular among both online shoppers and businesses seeking to attract customers. A daily deal typically consists of a deep discount for a targeted group of shoppers over the limited period of a single day. We analyze the adoption process of daily deals and untangle the drivers of adoption by analyzing a unique dataset we have scraped from Woot, an Amazon-owned daily deal website. We model the adoption of each daily deal as a Bass diffusion process that lasts 24 hours from one midnight to the next. Our results show that while price discount is a significant driver of purchases under daily deals, other factors such as consumers’ prior experience and time-of-day also have a substantial quantifiable impact. It also matters whether the discount information is provided to customers. We discuss managerial implications and propose extensions to our research.
Customer Needs and Solutions, 2021
This study rests on three premises. Consumers often make choice decisions considering multiple pr... more This study rests on three premises. Consumers often make choice decisions considering multiple products from one or more categories. Consumers’ levels of uncertainty with product performance or their own preference are nuanced in such portfolio-level situations. Under such uncertainty, extant approaches for reservation price elicitation do not suffice for product portfolios. Building on these premises, the authors propose ICEPORT, an approach for Incentive Compatible Elicitation of reservation prices for product PORTfolios. ICEPORT is able to capture the range in a consumer’s reservation prices for each individual product and combinations of products on offer. An empirical application in the context of root beer and cheese puffs, and a replication involving MLB merchandise, demonstrate the superior predictive performance of ICEPORT over several alternatives. The authors note, among managerial implications of ICEPORT, its potential for improving pricing decisions. Limitations of this study and future research directions are discussed.
Marketing Science, 2019
We develop and apply a model based on conditional restricted Boltzmann machines to analyze intert... more We develop and apply a model based on conditional restricted Boltzmann machines to analyze intertemporal crossproduct purchase patterns in enormous consumer purchase data sets.
Marketing Letters, 2018
Brand alliances, which involve intentionally presenting two or more brands together, appear in ma... more Brand alliances, which involve intentionally presenting two or more brands together, appear in many different forms. For example, Subway stores placed within Wal-Mart, Airbus A380 airplanes with Rolls-Royce Trent engines, and Nike+iPod co-developed personal trainers are among the more well-known manifestations of this strategy. Our study contributes to the literature on brand alliances by conceptualizing and measuring a typology of brand alliance types based on their degree of integration. We also empirically test and find that consumers are sensitive to varying degrees of brand alliance integration. We then link these findings to the managerial decision of how and with whom a brand should form an alliance. We use extensive examples, conversations with managers, and survey-based experiments to show that brand alliance integration is relevant and impactful to both managers and consumers.
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014
Conventional wisdom ties successful innovation primarily to technological R&D. In this paper,... more Conventional wisdom ties successful innovation primarily to technological R&D. In this paper, we introduce the concept of marketing innovation in which novelty originates separately from the innova...
Psychometrika, 1994
This paper presents a new procedure called TREEFAM for estimating ultrametric tree structures fro... more This paper presents a new procedure called TREEFAM for estimating ultrametric tree structures from proximity data confounded by differential stimulus familiarity. The objective of the proposed TREEFAM procedure is to quantitatively "filter out" the effects of stimulus unfamiliarity in the estimation of an ultrametric tree. A conditional, alternating maximum likelihood procedure is formulated to simultaneously estimate an ultrametric tree, under the unobserved condition of complete stimulus familiarity, and subject-specific parameters capturing the adjustments due to differential unfamiliarity. We demonstrate the performance of the TREEFAM procedure under a variety of alternative conditions via a modest Monte Carlo experimental study. An empirical application provides evidence that the TREEFAM outperforms traditional models that ignore the effects of unfamiliarity in terms of superior tree recovery and overall goodness-of-fit.
Marketing Letters, 1992
This paper presents a multidimensional scaling (MDS) methodology (vector model) for the spatial a... more This paper presents a multidimensional scaling (MDS) methodology (vector model) for the spatial analysis of preference data that explicitIy models the effects of unfamiliarity on evoked preferences. Our objective is to derive a joint space map of brand locations and consumer preference vectors that is free from potential distortion resulting from the analysis of preference data confounded with the effects of consumer-specific brand unfamiliarity. An application based on pre/'erence and familiarity ratings for ten luxury car models collected from 240 consumers who intended to buy a luxury car within a designated time frame is presented. The results are corupared with those obtained from MDPREF, a popular metric vector MDS model used for the scaling o~ preference data. tn particular, we find that the consumer preference vectors obtained from the proposed methodology are substantially different in orientation from those estimated by the MDPREF model. The implications of the methodology are discussed.
Managerial and Decision Economics, 1990
A game‐theoretic model is employed to examine the conditions under which firms in a duopoly, face... more A game‐theoretic model is employed to examine the conditions under which firms in a duopoly, faced with a new product introduction opportunity of uncertain profitability (because of uncertainty in demand), choose to enter the market immediately or, alternatively, decide to wait, thereby avoiding the risk of failure. The implications for a firm's strategic behavior are contrasted with situations in which the competitor is believed to be (1) passive, implying that the firm expects to enjoy indefinite monopoly status if it introduces the new product, and (2) committed to a waiting strategy, implying monopoly status for a limited time period, if the new product is successful.
Management Science, 1995
We examine pricing policy for a monopolist facing uncertain demand in a market characterized by d... more We examine pricing policy for a monopolist facing uncertain demand in a market characterized by dynamics on the demand side (such as diffusion or saturation effects) and/or on the cost side (experience curve effects). Our model explicitly incorporates the impact of demand uncertainty, and thus allows us to analyze the implications of uncertainty on the optimal price path, by contrasting the stochastic policy with the corresponding deterministic policy. We begin with an analysis of the general model and then focus on several special cases based on well known demand specifications to gain more specific insights and to suggest directional guidelines for dynamic pricing decisions in an uncertain environment. In general, the interaction among uncertainty, demand and/or cost dynamics, and firm's discount rate. Thus, farsighted firms operating under dynamic market conditions with high demand uncertainty, such as high tech companies with innovative products for consumer or industrial ma...
Journal of Marketing Research, 1995
The authors propose a methodology for determining the segment-level impact of explanatory variabl... more The authors propose a methodology for determining the segment-level impact of explanatory variables on multiple criterion measures obtained on a constant-sum scale. These explanatory variables could characterize different product, situation, or person related conditions that either occur naturally or are experimentally manipulated. Their proposed methodology simultaneously estimates market segment membership and multivariate segment-level parameters for each dependent criterion, using finite mixtures of conditional Dirichlet distributions. They conduct a modest Monte Carlo simulation analysis to investigate the performance of the proposed methodology. The authors also provide an empirical application to industrial buying decisions that examines the impact of the type of buying situation on multiple vendor selection criteria such as economic cost, functional performance, vendor cooperation, and vendor capability.
Journal of Marketing Research, 1999
Walker and Damien (1999) assert that the latent segmentation model developed by Ramaswamy, Chatte... more Walker and Damien (1999) assert that the latent segmentation model developed by Ramaswamy, Chatterjee, and Cohen (1996) is nonidentifiable. In response, the authors show that this assertion is incorrect, because the model considered by Walker and Damien is not equivalent to Ramaswamy, Chatterjee, and Cohen's model. The authors discuss and clarify issues of identifiability pertaining to latent segmentation models. Reply to "A Note on Ramaswamy, Chatterjee, and Cohen's Latent Joint Segmentation Models" We thank Professors Walker and Damien for raising an important issue that deserves the attention of marketers. There has been substantial research interest in the development and application of latent segmentation models in marketing during the past decade (Wedel and Kamakura 1998). The issue of model identifiability raised by Walker and Damien (1999, hereafter WD) is pertinent to much of this literature, and not limited to Ramaswamy, Chatterjee, and Cohen's (1996) joint segmentation model (hereafter RCC). Thus, our reply to WD provides an opportunity to clarify and elaborate on model identifiability issues pertaining not only to RCC, but also more generally to a class of latent segmentation models based on categorical data (see for example, Dillon and Kumar 1994). We first show that the model considered by WD in their Equations 1-4 is not equivalent to that by RCC. Specifically, the WD model is based on observations from respondents that consist of categorical data on a single variable, whereas the RCC model considers data on multiple categorical variables. It is the information contained in the pattern of data across the variables over the respondents that allows for the identification of latent segments. When multiple categorical variables are collapsed into a single composite categorical variable (e.g., four 2-level categorical variables collapsed into a single 16-level categorical variable), this information
Journal of Marketing Research, 1992
The rising cost of an industrial sales call underscores the need for integration of personal sell... more The rising cost of an industrial sales call underscores the need for integration of personal selling with other modes of industrial communication, notably advertising, within the overall context of efficient resource deployment. The authors propose an approach to assess the joint impact of advertising and personal selling effort on sales of a mature industrial product and thereby to plan the overall communications budget and its split between advertising and personal selling. Through an empirical application, they demonstrate the estimation of a communications response model and its use as an input to the planning process. In the illustration, the model's recommendation calls for an increase in the total communications budget over the current level, as well as some reallocation among its elements, based on a multiperiod profit-maximizing objective. Finally, to obtain a more general understanding of communications budgeting under different market situations, the authors employ the model to investigate analytically the impact of key market factors on the optimal level and allocation of communications effort. A Communications Response Model for a Mature Industrial Product: Application and Implications Communication with current and potential customers is an important task in marketing industrial products. Typically, the vehicles of information dissemination include advertising, personal selling, trade shows, direct mail, and telemarketing, though the traditional emphasis has been on personal selling. In planning communications expenditures in terms of both the level and the mix, industrial marketers appear to have minimal information about the relative effectiveness of the different elements in the mix. As a result, many firms have little indication of whether they are spending enough or too much on sales effort, services, or advertising (Business Marketing 1987).
Journal of Marketing Research, 1988
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
Journal of Marketing Research, 2006
The marketing and sales functions in many firms are often at odds despite their common goal of in... more The marketing and sales functions in many firms are often at odds despite their common goal of increasing revenue and profit. The finger pointing goes both ways: Marketing complains of poor lead follow-up by sales, and in turn, sales grumbles about the quality of leads generated by marketing. This disconnect can be damaging; high lead volumes generated through effective marketing campaigns could actually hurt downstream sales because of wasted effort on poorly qualified leads and/or delays in sales follow-up resulting from limited sales force capacity. To examine the revenue and profit implications of coordinated communications efforts at the marketing-sales interface, the authors develop a three-stage model that captures the effects of sequential marketing/sales communications on lead generation, appointment conversion, and sales closure. The results, which are based on a collaborative effort with a large home improvement retailer, suggest a complex interplay among marketing effort...
Journal of Marketing Research, 1985
The authors review a representative cross-section of analytical models of competition using a fra... more The authors review a representative cross-section of analytical models of competition using a framework for competitive analysis developed from a marketing perspective. Models are classified by the substantive issues they address and by the underlying modeling strategy. The implications of the various models are presented and discussed, and a set of empirically testable propositions is given. Some substantive areas that have been neglected by analytical modelers are identified. Other issues that warrant research attention by marketing behavioral scientists and econometricians are suggested as opportunities for future research.
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Papers by Rabikar Chatterjee