2019 Volume 46 Issue 2 Pages 73-85
Customers who hunt only for sale items in shopping are commonly referred to as cherry pickers. However, the quantitative identification of cherry pickers remains controversial in the relevant literature. This study proposes a new approach for identifying cherry pickers with a latent transition model. The proposed approach is sufficiently flexible such that the associated latent class vary over time with the purchasing attitudes of customers. Also, the covariates of the model include the demographic characteristics and the purchase experience of individual customers. The investigation for the purchase experience effect is so important for establishing marketing strategies. In practice, the inference is performed with a stage estimation method. This study illustrates the proposed approach with a purchase data set on an E-commerce website. The results reveal the dynamic patterns of the purchasing attitudes including the latent states of cherry-picking behavior.
