Estimating household purchase rates for consumer nondurable goods

Understanding the purchase rates of households for frequently purchased packaged goods is an important element in developing effective marketing strategies. Previous researchers have attempted to estimate these rates by assuming that the time between purchases is a random variable that follows some common parametric probability distribution such as the exponential or Weibull distribution. Recent research has shown that for many frequently purchased packaged goods, the interpurchase times cannot be adequately described by these commonly used probability distributions. In this study we demonstrate how household purchase rates can be estimated in a robust manner using a generalized semiparametric approach that obviates the need for specifying a parametric form for the distribution of interpurchase times. The motivation being that often there is no theory of household purchase behaviour that specifies a priori the probability distribution underlying the interpurchase times. Our empirical results indicate that, for the data analysed, the household purchase rates exhibit a regular pattern that cannot be recovered by probability distributions often used in previous research. Further, marketing actions taken by sellers do indeed influence household purchase behaviour.