Suchergebnisse

The magic word of the last years is internationalization. Researchers more and more focus on export market information and the relationship between this information and export performance. Just a few studies take into account the impact of firm characteristics on these topics. This study shows that country-of-origin, sector and size class (both individually and simultaneously) influence both the number of information sources consulted, and the type of information provider consulted. Besides, the relationship between the amount of export market information and export sales is not straightforward, but needs to be corrected for these three firm characteristics. These conclusions have implications for governmental export promotion campaigns, for the information behaviour of SME-managers, and for the strategies of information providers.

In the last two decades, marketing databases have grown significantly in terms of size and richness of available information. The analysis of these databases raises several information‐related and statistical issues. We aim at providing an overview of a selection of issues related to the analysis of large data sets. We focus on the two important areas: single source databases and customer transaction databases. We discuss models that have been used to describe customer behavior in these fields. Among the issues discussed are the development of parsimonious models, estimation methods, aggregation of data, data‐fusion and the optimization of customer‐level profit functions. We conclude that problems related to the analysis of large databases are far from resolved, and will stimulate new research avenues in the near future.