New Perspectives on Customer 'Death' Using a Generalization of the Pareto/NBD Model

35 Pages Posted: 22 Jun 2007 Last revised: 21 Feb 2011

See all articles by Kinshuk Jerath

Kinshuk Jerath

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Marketing

Peter Fader

University of Pennsylvania - Marketing Department

Bruce Hardie

London Business School

Date Written: February 10, 2011

Abstract

Several researchers have proposed models of buyer behavior in noncontractual settings that assume that customers are “alive” for some period of time and then become permanently inactive. The best-known such model is the Pareto/NBD, which assumes that customer attrition (dropout or “death”) can occur at any point in calendar time. A recent alternative model, the BG/NBD, assumes that customer attrition follows a Bernoulli “coin-flipping” process that occurs in “transaction time” (i.e., after every purchase occasion). Although the modification results in a model that is much easier to implement, it means that heavy buyers have more opportunities to “die.”

In this paper, we develop a model with a discrete-time dropout process tied to calendar time. Specifically, we assume that every customer periodically “flips a coin” to determine whether she “drops out” or continues as a customer. For the component of purchasing while alive, we maintain the assumptions of the Pareto/NBD and BG/NBD models. This periodic death opportunity (PDO) model allows us to take a closer look at how assumptions about customer death influence model fit and various metrics typically used by managers to characterize a cohort of customers. When the time period after which each customer makes her dropout decision (which we call period length) is very small, we show analytically that the PDO model reduces to the Pareto/NBD. When the period length is longer than the calibration period, the dropout process is “shut off,” and the PDO model collapses to the negative binomial distribution (NBD) model. By systematically varying the period length between these limits, we can explore the full spectrum of models between the “continuous-time-death” Pareto/NBD and the naive “no-death” NBD.

In covering this spectrum, the PDO model performs at least as well as either of these models; our empirical analysis demonstrates the superior performance of the PDO model on two data sets. We also show that the different models provide significantly different estimates of both purchasing-related and death-related metrics for both data sets, and these differences can be quite dramatic for the death-related metrics. As more researchers and managers make anagerial judgments that directly relate to the death process, we assert that the model employed to generate these metrics should be chosen carefully.

Keywords: Customer-base analysis, Pareto/NBD, BG/NBD, customer attrition

Suggested Citation

Jerath, Kinshuk and Fader, Peter and Hardie, Bruce, New Perspectives on Customer 'Death' Using a Generalization of the Pareto/NBD Model (February 10, 2011). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=995558 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.995558

Kinshuk Jerath

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Marketing ( email )

New York, NY 10027
United States

Peter Fader (Contact Author)

University of Pennsylvania - Marketing Department ( email )

700 Jon M. Huntsman Hall
3730 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6340
United States

Bruce Hardie

London Business School ( email )

Regent's Park
London, NW1 4SA
United Kingdom

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