Article ID: | iaor20021623 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 31 |
Issue: | 3 |
Publication Date: | May 2001 |
Journal: | Interfaces |
Authors: | Fader Peter S., Hardie Bruce G.S. |
Keywords: | marketing, behaviour, forecasting: applications, e-commerce |
We conducted a modeling exercise in conjunction with the on-line music retailer CDNOW to develop a simple stochastic model of buyer behavior capable of forecasting medium-term aggregate CD purchasing by a cohort of new customers. We modeled weekly sales using a finite mixture of beta-geometric distributions with a separate time-varying component to capture nonstationarity in repeat buying. The resulting model can easily be implemented within a standard spreadsheet environment (for example, Microsoft Excel). It does a good job of describing the underlying sales patterns and produces an excellent medium-term forecast.