Forefront Economics has made the items listed below available for download free of charge to the general public. Please help yourself to any of these papers and let us know if you have any comments or questions regarding any of the findings or approaches discussed in the materials.

All papers are provided in PDF (Portable Document Format). If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader, you may download it for free at the Adobe Acrobat website.

Thank you for your interest in the papers provided and again, if you have any special needs we would be happy to work with you.

Papers to Download:

• Mining for New Customers (PDF)
  Slides from a presentation by Mark Thompson at ESource 2001.
• Mining the Wild Wild Web (PDF)
  Slides from a presentation by Mark Thompson at DiamondSUG, San Francisco, CA May 29, 2000.
• The Science and Art of Market Segmentation Using PROC FASTCLUS (PDF)
  An example of business customer segmentation using the FASTCLUS procedure in SAS/STAT software is presented in this paper. Significant discussion is devoted to the empirical issues that must be addressed when using statistical clustering procedures to segment customers. The target audience is the business analyst and applied market manager.
  
  This paper was published in the Proceedings of the 24th Annual SAS User's Group International Conference in 1999, and was awarded Best Contributed Paper in the Statistics, Data Analysis and Modeling section.
• Using SAS® to Determine the Revenue Impacts from Emerging Products (PDF)
  This paper presents the approach and results of research designed to combine customer survey information with monthly billing data to estimate the impact of gas fireplace and logs ownership on annual therm consumption. It was presented at the Western Load Research Association Spring 1996 Conference in Portland, Oregon and at the Pacific Northwest SAS Users Group Conference, November 1997 in Victoria, British Columbia. At the WLRA conference it was titled: "Econometric Estimates of Therm Consumption Impacts from the Installation of Hearth Products"
• Using Excel with SAS to Combine Customer Survey Data Sets (PDF)
  This paper presents an approach for combining customer survey data sets from several years into one customer research data set. Due to changes in company needs, company personnel, and external vendors, customer surveys tend to change in content and format from survey to survey. These changes make using a combined data set from more than one survey difficult. However, the rewards from a richer customer information data set can pay rich dividends. A method that utilizes Excel to build SAS code for applying data conversion macros and consistent formatting and labeling is discussed in the paper. This method was used to successfully merge the results of five years of customer surveys for a Pacific Northwest company.