Modeling Purchase-Timing and Brand-Switching Behavior Incorporating Explanatory Variables and Unobserved Heterogeneity
采用连续时间半马尔可夫方法，同时分析家庭购买时机和品牌转换决策，发现购买间隔分布因品牌转换类型而异，且营销组合对品牌转换率解释力强但对重复购买率解释力弱。
The authors use a continuous-time semi-Markov approach to analyze in a single framework the purchase-timing and brand-switching decisions of households for a frequently purchased product. The analysis provides more insights into the dynamics of household purchase behavior than could be obtained from conventional discrete choice models such as logit or probit. The authors find that the probability distribution of interpurchase times is not the same for various switching between brands, revealing extra information about the purchase-timing decisions. Further, they find that though the marketing mix and household demographic variables explain a large part of the variation in the brand-switching rates, they account for only a small part of the variation in the repeat purchase rates. Another finding from the analysis is that the rates of switching between brands due to promotional activities such as special displays and price reductions are in reverse order to the share of purchases of the various brands.