News Room

CATONSVILLE, MD, February 3, 2015 - Marketing managers traditionally segment customers by three summary measures: recency – how long since their last visit, frequency – how often they visit, and monetary value – how much they spend on a visit (also known as the RFM model).   An upcoming Marketing Science paper by Yao Zhang, Eric Bradlow and Dylan Small shows that in contrast to this traditional segmentation, one based on “binge consumption” is worth more in the long run. Binge consumption is characterized by bursts of heavy buying interspersed by little or no buying. The authors call this pattern of consumption “clumpiness.”

CATONSVILLE, MD, January 31, 2015 – Retailers selling home appliances and electronics goods typically make 15-20 percent profit from these products but realize more than 200 percent profit from selling extended warranties for these products. A new study that appears in the January issue of Marketing Science, a publication of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), finds that even though selling warranties through independent firms will lower extended warranty prices, the consumers may actually be worse off.

The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®) today announced three finalist schools in the competition for the UPS George D. Smith Prize, an award created to strengthen ties between academia and industry. The award recognizes excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of analytics and operations research.