K. Helsen et Dc. Schmittlein, ANALYZING DURATION TIMES IN MARKETING - EVIDENCE FOR THE EFFECTIVENESS OF HAZARD RATE MODELS, Marketing science, 12(4), 1993, pp. 395-414
Some statistical methods developed recently in the biometrics and econ
ometrics literature show great promise for improving the analysis of d
uration times in marketing. They incorporate the right censoring that
is prevalent in duration times data, and can be used to make a wide va
riety of useful predictions. Both of these features make these methods
preferable to the regression, logit, and discriminant analyses that m
arketers have typically used in analyzing durations. This paper is int
ended to fulfill three objectives. First, we demonstrate how decision
situations that involve durations differ from other marketing phenomen
a. Second, we show how standard modeling approaches to handle duration
times can break down because of the peculiarities inherent in duratio
ns. It has been suggested in recent marketing articles that an alterna
tive to these conventional procedures, i.e., hazard rate models and pr
oportional hazard regression, can more effectively handle duration typ
e data. Third, to investigate whether these proposed benefits are in f
act delivered for marketing durations data, we estimate and validate b
oth conventional and hazard rate models for household interpurchase ti
mes of saltine crackers. Our findings indicate the superiority of prop
ortional hazard regression methods vis-a-vis common procedures in term
s of stability and face validity of the estimates and in predictive ac
curacy.