Using Visa debit and credit card transactions in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, we document the importance of customers in accounting for sales variation across merchants, across stores within retail chains, and over time for individual merchants and stores. Customers, as opposed to transactions...

Substantial excitement currently exists in industry regarding the potential of using analytic tools to measure sentiment in social media messages to help predict individual reactions to a new product, including movies. However, the majority of models subsequently used for forecasting exercises...