Qualifying Purchase Intentions Using Queueing Theory

Abstract

We propose that a consumer’s purchase behaviour emulates a cognitive framework such that an appropriately selected queueing model can be used to assess the credibility of a consumer’s expression of purchase intention to proceed into purchase action. The modelling idea is to envision that the customer has a mental queue of needs, and the surfacing of a need represents a new arrival to this queue while a purchase satisfying a need represents a departure from the queue. Using queueing formulae (and/or readily available tables on queueing), several statistics known as "operating characteristics" can be computed to capture and describe the individual’s current need status. Hence, a description of the customer’s state of readiness or prospect of actually executing the expressed purchase intention for a product (good or service) whose future sales are of interest in a market survey may be obtained. In this paper, such a description is termed Individual Buyer Profile (IBP), and IBP is offered as a purchase intention qualifier.