Managing Customer Acquisition Risk Using Co-operative Databases
本文提出一个利用合作数据库管理客户获取风险的框架，并以直接邮寄中的“先买后付”支付选项为例，展示考虑坏账风险的模型优于忽略该风险的方案。
Acquisition of new customers involves both opportunity and risk, and it is important for firms to predict and manage the risks involved in customer acquisition. Despite its importance, the management of customer acquisition risk has not been the subject of much academic research. This paper develops a framework for firms to manage customer acquisition risk using co-operative databases. We illustrate this framework in the context of the optimal selection of customers for direct mail with a ‘buy now, pay later’ payment option when the acquisition risk manifests as bad debt risk. Using data from a large scale direct marketing campaign, we show that our empirical model that incorporates bad debt risk substantially outperforms suboptimal targeting schemes that overlook bad debt risk. We also demonstrate how alleviating bad debt risk is one beneficial outcome of a fairly recent trend in database marketing, namely the emergence of co-operative databases.