We address a critical question that many firms are facing in this era of "big data'': Can customer data be stored and analyzed in an easy-to-manage and scalable manner without significantly compromising the inferences that can be made about the customers' transaction activity? We address this...

Many businesses track repeat transactions on a discrete-time basis. These include: (1) companies where transactions can only occur at fixed regular intervals, (2) firms that frequently associate transactions with specific events (e.g., a charity that records whether or not supporters respond to...

Several researchers have proposed models of buyer behavior in noncontractual settings that assume that customers are “alive” for some period of time and then become permanently inactive. The best-known such model is the Pareto/NBD, which assumes that customer attrition (dropout or...