Nonlinear response models
1. Nonlinear response models
In this lesson, we focus on the most common type of response models used in marketing practice – and these are nonlinear models.2. Linear response function
The assumption of sales increase by a constant amount when prices decrease by a constant amount is far from being consistent with the ways markets appear to behave in reality, because: What happens to sales when price is zero or very large? And what about threshold effects like a minimum price?3. Exponential response function
Basic economic theory lets us expect that if beer is very cheap, customers will probably buy more whereas if the price of beer is high customers are less likely to buy. If in a price promotion campaign the price for beer is being decreased, at some point, returns in sales must be expected to diminish. This means: we expect price decreases to have more effect on sales returns when price itself is higher than when it is lower. Most market response models are nonlinear to resemble diminishing returns and there exist several functional forms that can be used to represent this phenomenon. One of the most frequently used response functions to describe sales-price relations is the so-called exponential model. This model is appropriate if price equals zero - sales equal zero, if price decreases then sales increase, whereas if the price goes to infinity, sales tend to zero. At the same time, the exponential model assumes a constant rate of increased sales, meaning: a constant percentage change. The slope coefficient measures the relative change in SALES for a given absolute change in PRICE. If the relative change is multiplied by one-hundred we obtain the percentage change or growth rate.4. Linearizing
The exponential model is nonlinear in its definition, but after taking the logarithms of both sides the model becomes a linear model and can again be estimated by using the linear model function. We take the log() of the SALES directly in the formula statement of the linear model function and store the estimation results in an object called log-dot-model. The model coefficients are again obtained from the log-dot-model object by using the coefficient function. The price slope coefficient is still negative in its sign but changed in size as changes in SALES are now expressed relative to changes in PRICE. Therefore, the coefficients are interpreted as "if the price increases around 1 unit, our sales decrease around 66 percent”.5. What's the value added?
Again, we check if the model provides an acceptable degree of predictive accuracy by comparing the model’s predicted values in a scatterplot to the observed data values. This time we create the scatterplot on the log-transformed SALES responses versus the untransformed PRICE predictor by using the function plot. The predicted log SALES are added to the graph by again plugging in the model coefficients of the log.model object into the function abline(). Like before we can see that the log SALES decrease when PRICE increases but the line does deviate less from the observations meaning: the model fits the data much better than before.6. Let's practice!
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