Abstract:

Even if consumers know what they want, they are often unable to select the product option that promises the highest expected utility, simply because their individual product conceptualization is incompatible with the product-centred language the provider is employing. One consequence of this confusion is a cautious buying behaviour most prominent in industries such as tourism, financial services or telecommunications. This paper presents a conceptual framework and a pragmatic implementation of an online matching algorithm based on an efficient self-correcting customer profiling technique that is empirically superior to many other approaches.