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One of the major issues confronting marketing decision makers is how to deal with the volume and complexity of customer information available. In addition to dealing with the volume of data issue, “relationship marketing” has also become an important focus, largely owing to the recognition that maintaining an existing customer base is far more cost‐effective than replacing disaffected customers with new users. As marketers refocus on customer‐centred relationships, however, efforts have come to rely extensively on the volume of customer information available from computer‐and scanner‐based data. Valuable as the information in these databases can be, the end result is often a distancing of the company from its customers.

The concept of option pricing is used to develop an alternative model for pricing services that have a fixed availability and expiration. The binomial option pricing model and abandonment theory are financial models used to demonstrate that the option to cut price contributes positively to a service’s expected profitability. Pricing of hotel rooms is used to demonstrate in a marketing context the use of this option model approach. Airline seats, events, and vacation house rentals are some of the many other alternative applications among consumer services, as broadcast time is a similar example among industrial services.

This paper presents new evidence that the error in estimating the economic welfare of a transport scheme can be very large. This is for two reasons. Firstly when cost changes are large the income effect can be significant. This means the change in consumer surplus is no longer a good estimate of the compensating variation — the true measure of welfare benefit. Secondly, in the presence of large cost changes estimating the change in consumer surplus using the Rule of Half can lead to large errors. The paper uses a novel approach based on stated choice and contingent valuation data to estimate the size of this error for the situation of the provision of fixed links to islands in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

This study aims to investigate the factors that influence young consumers' purchase intention towards dietary supplements (DS) in Malaysia.

The supplement industry in Malaysia has been growing rapidly recently due to a paradigm shift in healthcare management, from curative to prevention. Thus, it has sparked interest to conduct a study on the factors that influence young consumers' purchase intentions towards DS. With a response rate of 74.5%, a survey questionnaire was used to elicit data from 149 Gen-Y respondents who consume supplements on a regular basis.

The results revealed that the influencing factors towards purchase decisions among these Gen-Y respondents aged between 17 and 25 are based on product knowledge and product quality. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are outlined at the end of this paper.

This study offers empirical insights from the perspective of an emerging digital economy on the factors that influence young consumers' purchase intentions towards DS in Malaysia.