Many services are delivered to a (large) number of customers simultaneously within a confined zone (e.g., restaurants, resorts, trains, and airplanes). Under unexpected high demand, customers experience discomfort from two major sources: (a) the that arises when too many customers (i.e.,...

Service providers and their customers are sometimes victims of failures caused by exogenous factors such as unexpected bad weather, power outages, or labor strikes. When such no-fault failures occur in confined zones, service providers may confine customers against their will if making...

Various business problems are of interest to both data mining and marketing academic communities, such as market segmentation, direct marketing, targeted marketing, personalization/customization, cross selling and discovering customer lifetime value. Yet, these two disciplines have very...