Decision Science in Action

It is desirable for a retailer to have information of the life cycle stage of  a customer. This helps greatly to a retailer in offer optimizations. Targeting right customer with rights offers is greatest challenge for a retailer. They run hundreds of promotions and optimizing it saves huge cost and helps in retaining customers.  In the era of super markets, large retailers issue loyalty cards and maintain customer purchase data. But most of the demographic data is not available with them as customers normally do not fill these fields and leave them blank. Although customer demographic data are not available using purchase data certain life stages of customer can be predicted using rule base techniques or predictive modeling. Life stages bring changes in purchasing pattern. 1.  A single male will mostly buy his needs and daily eatables.  Eating habits gets changed if he is married etc.  A man can occasionally buy woman's product but it will be regular if ...

I had came across this word Game Theory when I was taking course of Operations Research at IIT Kanpur but at that point of time I only gave attention from academic point of view and after having a basic understanding of it I moved on. Almost half a year later I watched Beautiful Mind and got flavor of importance Game Theory in economics and mathematics. Recently I downloaded two lecture notes from University of Penn and MIT and then started going through it. Suddenly I realized that Game Theory can also be applied in team performance when number players may be from 2 to N and number of Games can also be N where N is any positive integer. Any team is good as the members of the team. Performance of individuals, definitely has impact on overall performance of the team. It is given that all the members in a team may not be at same level of experience, knowledge. Their personality may be different.  But, all the members are tied together with a common team goal and the out come is ...