Publications

Educators

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2020
Working Paper

Overcoming the Cold Start Problem of CRM Using a Probabilistic Machine Learning Approach

By: Eva Ascarza

The success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs ultimately depends on the firm's ability to understand consumers' preferences and precisely capture how these preferences may differ across customers. Only by understanding customer heterogeneity, firms can... View Details

Keywords: Customer Management; Targeting; Deep Exponential Families; Probabilistic Machine Learning; Cold Start Problem; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Consumer Behavior; Analytics and Data Science; Mathematical Methods; Retail Industry

SSRN

March 2018
Article

In Pursuit of Enhanced Customer Retention Management: Review, Key Issues, and Future Directions

By: Eva Ascarza, Scott A. Neslin, Oded Netzer, Zachery Anderson, Peter S. Fader, Sunil Gupta, Bruce Hardie, Aurelie Lemmens, Barak Libai, David T. Neal, Foster Provost and Rom Schrift

In today’s turbulent business environment, customer retention presents a significant challenge for many service companies. Academics have generated a large body of research that addresses part of that challenge—with a particular focus on predicting customer churn.... View Details

Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Customer Relationship Management; Measurement and Metrics

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management

January–February 2018
Article

Some Customers Would Rather Leave Without Saying Goodbye

By: Eva Ascarza, Oded Netzer and Bruce G.S. Hardie

We investigate the increasingly common business setting in which companies face the possibility of both observed and unobserved customer attrition (i.e., “overt” and “silent” churn) in the same pool of customers. This is the case for many online-based services where... View Details

Keywords: Churn; Retention; Attrition; Customer Base Analysis; Hidden Markov Models; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior

Article

Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns

By: Eva Ascarza, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer and Matthew Danielson

Customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. The authors demonstrate that in business settings characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the... View Details

Keywords: Social Effects; Field Experiment; Mobile; Customer Relationship Management; Network Effects; Consumer Behavior

2017
Chapter

Marketing Models for the Customer-Centric Firm

By: Eva Ascarza, Peter S. Fader and Bruce G.S. Hardie

A customer-centric firm takes the view that there are three key drivers of (organic) growth and overall profitability: Customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer development (i.e., increasing the value of each existing customer (per unit of time) while they... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Focus and Relationships

Article

The Perils of Proactive Churn Prevention Using Plan Recommendations: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By: Eva Ascarza, Raghuram Iyengar and Martin Schleicher

Facing the issue of increasing customer churn, many service firms have begun recommending pricing plans to their customers. One reason behind this type of retention campaign is that customers who subscribe to a plan suitable for them should be less likely to churn... View Details

Keywords: Churn/retention; Field Experiment; Pricing; Tariff/plan Choice; Targeting; Customer Relationship Management; Price; Performance Effectiveness

2015
Case

EPILOGUE: Kate Spade New York: Will Expansion Deepen or Dilute the Brand?

By: Eva Ascarza and Keith Wilcox

2015
Case

Kate Spade New York: Will Expansion Deepen or Dilute the Brand?

By: Keith Wilcox and Eva Ascarza

Purchase

2015
Teaching Note

Kate Spade New York: Will Expansion Deepen or Dilute the Brand? Teaching Note

By: Eva Ascarza and Keith Wilcox

July–August 2013
Article

A Joint Model of Usage and Churn in Contractual Settings

By: Eva Ascarza and Bruce G.S. Hardie

As firms become more customer-centric, concepts such as customer equity come to the fore. Any serious attempt to quantify customer equity requires modeling techniques that can provide accurate multiperiod forecasts of customer behavior. Although a number of researchers... View Details

Keywords: Churn; Retention; Contractual Settings; Access Services; Hidden Markov Models; RFM; Latent Variable Models; Customer Value and Value Chain; Consumer Behavior

Article

When Talk Is "Free": The Effect of Tariff Structure on Usage Under Two- and Three-Part Tariffs

By: Eva Ascarza, Anja Lambrecht and Naufel Vilcassim

In many service industries, firms introduce three-part tariffs to replace or complement existing two-part tariffs. In contrast with two-part tariffs, three-part tariffs offer allowances, or “free” units of the service. Behavioral research suggests that the attributes... View Details

Keywords: Pricing; Nonlinear Pricing; Discrete/continuous Choice Model; Three-part Tariffs; Free Products; Price; Consumer Behavior; Analysis; Learning; Risk and Uncertainty

Forthcoming
Article

Advancing Personalization: How to Experiment, Learn & Optimize

By: Aurelie Lemmens, Jason M.T. Roos, Sebastian Gabel, Eva Ascarza, Hernan Bruno, Elea McDonnell Feit, Brett Gordon, Ayelet Israeli, Carl F. Mela and Oded Netzer

Personalization has become the heartbeat of modern marketing. Advances in causal inference and machine learning enable companies to understand how the same marketing action can impact the choices of individual customers differently. This article provides an academic... View Details

Keywords: Targeting; Experiments; Observational Studies; Policy Implementation; Policy Evaluation; Customization and Personalization; Marketing Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Research