Direct mailing decisions based on the worst and best practice cross-efficiency evaluations

  • Authors:

  • Mahdi Mahdiloo;Abdollah Noorizadeh;Reza Farzipoor Saen

  • Affiliations:

  • Griffith Business School, Gold Coast Campus, Griffith University, QLD 4222, Australia;Department of Industrial Management, Lappeenranta University of Technology, P.O. Box: 20, 53851 Lappeenranta, Finland;Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Management and Accounting, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, P.O. Box: 31485-313, Karaj, Iran

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Business Information Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The problem argued in the literature of direct mailing decisions generally contains three parts: 1 forecasting customers' future purchase/non-purchase responses; 2 evaluating the effectiveness of various strategies for increasing customers purchase responses; 3 prioritising the customers in terms of their values. A significant body of the literature has been dedicated to the first two components, and in particular, to purchase/non-purchase prediction modelling. However, in the current paper, we do not address these two components, but rather we focus on the third component. To this end, data envelopment analysis DEA technique and particularly cross-efficiency formulation of the best practice frontier Charnes, Cooper and Rhodes CCR Charnes et al., 1978 BPF-CCR is used to determine those customers who should be put on the first priorities of marketing mailing list. In addition, the cross-efficiency formulation of worst practice frontier CCR WPF-CCR is developed to exclude the worst customers from mailing list and save the mailing expenses for the best practice ones. Using a numerical example, the application of the proposed model is demonstrated.