Muzeeb Shaik

To meet sales targets with finite resources, business-to-business (B2B) service organizations need to prioritize promising sales opportunities from a large pipeline of possibilities. Extant evidence in theory and practice suggests that B2B service organizations use arbitrary or gut-based decision rules to prioritize sales opportunities, which leads to sub-optimal sales opportunity management and operations planning. We draw from the relationship management and organizational buying literature to build a new sales-operations framework that relates buyer-class typology (e.g., new bid vs. modified rebid), and opportunity characteristics (e.g., opportunity size) to a service organizations' decision to bid, and the bid outcome. Subsequently, we propose a combinatorial optimization approach that allows a company to take the right level of risk so that each region can maximize its sales potential given its finite capacity. We demonstrate that using the ensemble approach enables the focal company to improve its predictive validity over simple models by 11%. Moreover, by using a combinatorial optimization approach in conjunction with the predictive ensemble model, we retrospectively demonstrate that the focal firm could have increased its sales by 22% while bidding on 38% fewer projects.

School shootings are a disturbingly regular occurrence in the United States. While their direct impact on those involved are well-researched, their broader effects on communities are less understood. The authors focus on the underresearched question of how such traumatic incidents affect community consumption. Using data from various sources, the authors find that fatal school shootings decrease grocery purchases by 2.09% in affected communities, lasting up to six months. This economic impact is felt more in liberal- than conservative-leaning counties. Additionally, extended analysis reveals that these incidents reduce spending at food services and drinking places by 8% and at food and beverage stores by 3%. Three experimental studies provide evidence that this decrease is driven by heightened anxiety about public safety.

The authors synthesize research on the relationship of customer satisfaction with customer- and firm-level outcomes using a meta-analysis based on 535 correlations from 245 articles representing a combined sample size of 1,160,982. The results show a positive association of customer satisfaction with customer-level outcomes (retention, WOM, spending, and price) and firm-level outcomes (product-market, accounting, and financial-market performance). A moderator analysis shows the association varies due to many contextual factors and measurement characteristics. The results have important theoretical and managerial implications.

There has been increased interest in interventions to promote hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) surveillance given low utilization and high proportions of late stage detection. Accurate prediction of patients likely versus unlikely to respond to interventions could allow a cost-effective approach to outreach and facilitate targeting more intensive interventions to likely non-responders. We conducted a secondary analysis of a randomized clinical trial evaluating a mailed outreach strategy to promote HCC surveillance among 1200 cirrhosis patients at a safety-net health system. We developed regularized logistic regression (RLR) and gradient boosting machine (GBM) algorithm models to predict surveillance completion during each of the 3 screening rounds. The models demonstrated good discriminatory accuracy, with AUROC curves of 0.67 and 0.66 respectively in the first surveillance round and improved to 0.77 by the third surveillance round after incorporating prior screening behavior as a feature. Predictive models can help stratify patients' likelihood to respond to surveillance outreach invitations, facilitating tailored strategies to maximize effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of HCC surveillance population health programs.

Studies that examine the joint and interactive effect of marketing-mix factors and perceived switching costs on customer repurchase intentions are lacking. This is important because many companies use price discrimination strategies to target customers based on their purchase history, and the effectiveness of these strategies is dependent on the price sensitivity of these customers. We examine how price sensitivity moderates the relationship between customer perceived switching costs and repurchase intentions in business-to-business markets. Our findings demonstrate that price sensitivity plays a critical moderating role in the switching costs-repurchase intentions relationship, providing important implications for B2B relationship management and pricing strategies.