Statistical mechanics of choice and market segmentation by choice profiles
There are several main contributions of the work presented in this thesis. Specifically, we have: (1) Solved the problem of prediction of heterogeneity of consumer population in terms of choice behavior when the market shares held by the brands comprising the market are known. (2) Addressed a long-standing dispute in the marketing literature on the validity of entropy-based models of buyer behavior. (3) Introduced a behavioral mode segmentation by choice profiles. (4) Obtained a closed form of two families of distributions, namely simplex-geometric and simplex-exponential distributions, that have applicability far beyond the context in which we arrived at them.
Business Administration, Marketing, Mathematics, Statistics
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign