Comparing Loyalty Program Tiering Strategies: An investigation from the gaming industry

Loyalty programs are popular marketing strategies developed for the purpose of attracting, maintaining, and enhancing customer relationships. Due to the explosive worldwide growth of, and increased competition within, the casino industry has compelled contemporary casino marketers to rely more heavily on loyalty programs to increase guest allegiance and the frequency of repeat visits from their customers. Despite the widespread usage of loyalty programs across various gaming businesses in Las Vegas, its effectiveness has not quite been validated. The purpose of this study is to examine customers’ behavioral loyalty within the Las Vegas gaming industry and examine the effectiveness of a specific loyalty program using secondary data obtained from a Las Vegas casino hotel. Specifically, this study segmented loyalty program members to investigate the effectiveness of a casino loyalty program’s tiering strategy on members’ purchase behavior. Further, this study employed Recency-Frequency-Monetary (RFM) analysis to examine two different types of tiering strategies

Session 2-3-F: Gaming Applications of a Forgotten Distribution

Introduction The bonus game has become a very important part of the slot machine, as indicated by a large number of patent applications and patents (Bennett, 2000; Slomiany and Grupp, 2000; Vancurra, 2000; Baerlocher et al, 2002; Jaffe et al, 2002; Cannon and Donovan, 2003; Dickerson, 2005). Therefore, probability distributions suitable for developing games are very much in need. In this study, we illustrate how a forgotten discrete probability distribution, viz. the negative hypergeometric distribution, can be used to develop bonus games for slot machines, and also to analyze existing bonus games. The mean and the variance for this distribution were not readily available. However, these measures were recently computed using a new technique (Jones, 2013) and are available at present. The mean of the probability distribution is needed to compute to the house advantage or par of a slot game, and the variance is needed for calculating the variance of the slot game payout distribution. The variance of a slot game significantly impacts the ‘time on device’ that a player gets (Lucas et al, 2007; Lucas and Singh, 2008) from the slot game, and therefore is an important parameter of a slot game

Estimating the Ability of Gamblers to Detect Differences in the Payback Percentages of Reel Slot Machines: A Closer Look at the Slot Player Experience

The results of play on 60 different computer simulated reel slots challenge the widely held theory that frequent slot players are able to detect changes in a slot machine\u27s house advantage as slight as 1 to 2%. These findings affect the formulation of critical and capital-intensive customer retention strategies and brand positioning campaigns within the gaming industry. An overwhelming majority of 10,000 virtual players were not able to reject the hypothesis of equal payback percentages after playing both a 3% game and a 12% game (i.e., a 400% increase in the house advantage). This result held across three levels of pay table variance and five levels of trials or spins. The differences in house advantages examined herein ranged from 33% to 400%, across the various 2-game comparisons. The results also fail to support those who argue or fear that frequent slot players are able to detect changes in the house advantage over time. Profits from slot operations are critical to the success of most casino resorts, making this research into the slot player experience a valuable contribution to both the literature and casino management

In silico comparative analysis of conserved genes expressed in solanaceous plants under abiotic stresses

The gene expression data was studied in order to analyze genes involved in different abiotic stresses in solanaceous plants. Salt, temperature (heat & cold) and drought are the main abiotic stresses to the plants. Abiotic stress responses are important for sessile organisms like plants because they have to cope with environmental changes to survive. The idea was to analyze those differentially expressed genes, which show common expression in response to different abiotic stress conditions in each plant. Mitogen activated protein kinases (MAPK) are important mediators in signal transmission, connecting the perception of external stimuli to cellular responses. In plants, MAPKs plays a major role in the signaling of abiotic stresses. The expression data were retrieved from gene expression omnibus (GEO) database at NCBI. The set of genes were selected showing up or down regulation in at least two abiotic stresses. These genes were used for searching their involvement in different steps of MAP kinase pathway. Our findings suggest that a common set of genes are the key players in signaling pathway responsible for initiation of cascade of reaction in response to stress. The study will help to understand how the conserved genes are expressing differentially in response to various abiotic stresses. The common genes affecting the MAP kinase pathway might be highly conserved. These genes may be used to study the response of different abiotic stresses in other plant species