Ameliorating buyer's remorse

Rakesh Agrawal, Samuel Ieong, Raja Velu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Keeping in pace with the increasing importance of commerce conducted over the Web, several e-commerce websites now provide admirable facilities for helping consumers decide what product to buy and where to buy it. However, since the prices of durable and high-tech products generally fall over time, a buyer of such products is often faced with a dilemma: Should she buy the product now or wait for cheaper prices? We present the design and implementation of Prodcast, an experimental system whose goal is to help consumers decide when to buy a product. The system makes use of forecasts of future prices based on price histories of the products, incorporating features such as sales volume, seasonality, and competition in making its recommendation. We describe techniques that are well-suited for this task and present a comprehensive evaluation of their relative merits using retail sales data for electronic products. Our back-testing of the system indicates that the system is capable of helping consumers time their purchase, resulting in significant savings to them.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD'11
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages351-359
Number of pages9
ISBN (Print)9781450308137
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2011 - San Diego, United States
Duration: Aug 21 2011Aug 24 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Conference

Conference17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego
Period8/21/118/24/11

Keywords

  • Forecasting
  • Prodcast
  • Recommendation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems

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