Dynamic profiling of consumers for customized offerings over the Internet: a model and analysis

Delivery of customized, targeted advertisement messages, and delivery of customized information products and software products to consumers requires effective gathering and analysis of preference information. In this paper, we propose a model for dynamically profiling consumers' preferences that is based on the theory of questionnaires. The customization procedure is demonstrated for an example scenario of an informational brokerage where real-time financial, marketing, and company information products are offered to consumers. Simulation results show that the information acquisition and search process exhibits a nonlinear behavior in the information gained and the pattern of information gain is similar irrespective of the number of consumers polled. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.