Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5.2 Future Work
The proposed simulation focuses on the consumers' payment behavior. Never-
theless it is possible to calculate the business volume of a certain time interval
according to different payment configurations because the entering in the online
store and the filling of the shopping cart are also parts of the model. In order
to forecasts the profit of different scenarios the shopping simulation has to be
extended. Hence, one of our next steps is the integration of the specific costs
(fixed costs and transaction costs) of each payment method. We intend, fur-
ther, to develop an additional module that simulates the customer-specific risk
of non-payment.
The presented model considers only four payment methods namely purchase
on invoice, prepayment, credit card and cash on delivery. Thus, the adding of fur-
ther payment methods is an essential task for future modeling. Moreover, there
are various aspects that need refinement of the consumer behavior. Our initial
model differentiates between male and female customers. The distinction with
respect to additional attributes like age, salary or order frequency is future work.
Moreover, modeling the experience of customers and the influence of selecting a
payment method is also a future task.
We model the process of choosing an alternative payment method by using a
general utility for every type of payment. We intend for every attribute that af-
fects the decision process of a consumer (e.g. security, speed or consumer-specific
costs) to use several utility functions. The refinement of the utility function be-
longs also to our future work.
Acknowledgments.
The work presented in this paper is undertaken as a part
of the SimProgno project (01IS10042C). SimProgno is funded by the German
Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
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