Publications

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Summer 2025
Article

Dynamic Competition for Customer Memberships

By: Cristian Chica, Julian Jimenez-Cardenas and Jorge Tamayo

A competitive two-period membership (subscription) market is analyzed. Two symmetric firms charge a “membership” fee that allows consumers to buy products or services at a given unit price for both periods. Firms can choose between long- or short-term memberships. When... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Price Discrimination; Membership; Dynamic Competition; Competition; Price; Consumer Behavior; Business Model

May 1994
Background Note

Segmenting Customers in Mature Industrial Markets: An Application

By: V. Kasturi Rangan

In mature industrial markets, segmenting customers by size, industry, or product benefits alone rarely is sufficient. Customer behavior regarding trade-offs between price and service also becomes an important criterion. This note offers a framework to enable such... View Details

Keywords: Segmentation; Framework; Consumer Behavior; Marketing Strategy; Industrial Products Industry

21 Apr 2008
Research & Ideas

The New Math of Customer Relationships

customers. Has this concept taken hold in practice? A: When we observed a number of organizations leading to the original articulation of the service profit chain, we found a common behavior among the most successful ones. In various... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

June 2016
Teaching Note

Filene's Basement: Inside a Fired Customer's Relationship

By: Jill Avery and Susan Fournier

How, in a business climate in which building relationships with customers has dominated both managerial thought and marketing budgets, could Filene's Basement have fired a loyal customer, one who was formally and informally recognized as a best customer? This case... View Details

Keywords: CRM; Customer Profitability Analysis; Customer Lifetime Value; Consumer Behavior; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Customer Focus and Relationships; Brands and Branding; Customer Relationship Management; Retail Industry; United States

18 Nov 2009
HBS Case

Customer Feedback Not on elBulli’s Menu

customers like his product? HBS assistant professor Michael Norton's interest in what motivates seemingly irrational consumer behavior has found a perfect subject in Adrià. To eat at elBulli, View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Food & Beverage

13 Feb 2013
Research & Ideas

5 Weight Loss Tips From Behavioral Economists

week in advance of delivery. Looking to determine how personal decisions made for tomorrow differ from decisions made for several days from now, researchers from Harvard Business School and the Analyst Institute evaluated a year's worth of View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

05 Aug 2010
What Do You Think?

What Is Customer Opinion Good For?

or less important (because) customers had no sense when it came to entertaining tradeoffs (between features and cost)." Phil Clark commented that, regardless of method or purpose, "It is important to know your View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Technology

2024
Working Paper

The Operational Impact of Customer Location in On-Demand Services

By: Natalie Epstein, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno

The rapid growth of on-demand delivery services, particularly in the food and grocery sectors, has driven the expansion of hyperlocal fulfillment centers (FCs). This paper uses data from an on-demand grocery delivery platform in Latin America to assess how customer... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Logistics; Geographic Location; Service Delivery; Quality; Retail Industry; Latin America

SSRN

May 2011
Article

Think Customers Hate Waiting? Not So Fast...

By: Ryan W. Buell and Michael I. Norton

Managers typically look for ways to reduce wait time to increase customer satisfaction. New research suggests there's a better approach: showing customers a representation of the effort, whether literal or not, being expended on their behalf while they wait. (The... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Service Delivery; Consumer Behavior; Performance Effectiveness; Customer Satisfaction

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August 2018 (Revised September 2018)
Case

Predicting Purchasing Behavior at PriceMart (A)

By: Srikant M. Datar and Caitlin N. Bowler

This case follows VP of Marketing, Jill Wehunt, and analyst Mark Morse as they tackle a predictive analytics project to increase sales in the Mom & Baby unit of a nationally recognized retailer, PriceMart. Wehunt observed that in the midst of the chaos that surrounded... View Details

Keywords: Data Science; Analytics and Data Science; Analysis; Consumer Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction

December 2008
Article

Behavioral Frontiers in Choice Modeling

We review the discussion at a workshop whose goal was to achieve a better integration among behavioral, economic, and statistical approaches to choice modeling. The workshop explored how current approaches to the specification, estimation, and application of choice... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods; Integration; Goals and Objectives; Decision Choices and Conditions; Problems and Challenges; Business Processes; Customers; Behavior; Economics

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January 2003 (Revised September 2007)
Background Note

A Note on Racing to Acquire Customers

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann

Examines factors that motivate a firm's race to acquire customers in newly emerging markets and explores conditions under which racing strategies are likely to yield attractive returns. Provides a definition of racing behavior, introduces the notion of an optimal level... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Price Bubble; Network Effects; Emerging Markets; Market Entry and Exit; Behavior; Competition

24 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

Busting Six Myths About Customer Loyalty Programs

percent price advantage. For Asda, short-term profits don't seem to top its list of objectives. Loyalty Systems And Infrequently Purchased Goods Another myth is that loyalty programs do not work in categories that are purchased infrequently or do not affect the View Details

Keywords: by Marcel Corstjens & Rajiv Lal; Retail; Consumer Products

June 2016
Teaching Note

Relating to Peapod

By: Jill Avery and Susan Fournier

This case concerns the topics of relationship marketing, customer acquisition and retention, brand loyalty, service failure and recovery, new product introduction, and the use of consumer ethnography to study consumer behavior. Specifically, the case explores the... View Details

Keywords: Brand Management; Customer Relationship Management; CRM; Customer Behavior; Consumer Behavior; Retailing; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Marketing Channels; E-commerce; Retail Industry; United States

16 May 2011
Research & Ideas

What Loyalty? High-End Customers are First to Flee

Businesses that offer their customers the highest levels of service might like to believe that all their efforts to pamper and please will pay off with an extremely loyal following. “Customers you might expect to be the most 'stuck' are... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

March 2011
Background Note

Customer Loyalty Schemes in the Retail Sector

By: Jose B. Alvarez and Aldo Sesia

Customer loyalty schemes (or programs) are explicit efforts by retailers to gain long-term patronage from customers. Loyalty schemes are developed for a variety of reasons: to reward loyal customers, to generate more robust information about customer behavior, to... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior; Business Strategy; Retail Industry; United Kingdom; United States

March 2000 (Revised January 2001)
Background Note

Customers in Health Care, The

By: Richard M.J. Bohmer

Reviews the current literature on the consumers of health care, primarily patients. Discusses their stated preferences, the sources of information they use in making their selections of plan and provider, and their behavior. View Details

Keywords: Customers; Health Care and Treatment; Information; Planning; Behavior; Health Industry

March 31, 2023
Article

What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?

By: Julian De Freitas

Even though customer experience (CX) leaders are becoming increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys, they face a clear challenge: Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Customers; Brands and Branding

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

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