The selection of the most profitable customers in a customer database for targeted activities is often done based on observed behaviour in the past. Consequently, databases arising from the responses to, for example, direct mailings in the past are not random samples. When not all heterogeneity...

One of the aims of direct marketing in practice is to target the most profitable customers in the database at hand. This selection is often done based on observed behavior in the past. As a consequence, databases arising from the responses to direct mailings are not a random sample from all...