Know When to Hold Them: Applying the Customer Lifetime Value Concept to Casino Table Gaming

This article considers the impact of relationship marketing in the casino gaming industry. It illustrates how 'customer lifetime value' (LTV)--the estimated profitability of a customer over the course of his or her entire relationship with a company--can be uniquely and successfully applied to improve casino profitability. Findings indicate that increasing customer retention rates for prime customers and upgrading middle-tier customers to higher-volume betting tiers can both significantly increase long-term casino profits. Implementation of such a strategy also reduces a casino's reliance on the high-risk 'junket' segment for achieving targeted revenues and profits.     

CAN SUBGAME PERFECT EQUILIBRIUM THREATS FOSTER COOPERATION? AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF FINITE‐HORIZON FOLK THEOREMS

This paper considers extended prisoners' dilemma games in which a second pure strategy equilibrium in the stage game allows for mutual cooperation in all but the last round of the finitely repeated game as an equilibrium outcome. We distinguish a strict and a weak extension of the prisoners' dilemma game in a long and a short horizon treatment. A comparison with the corresponding finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games shows that the strict additional equilibrium increases cooperation rates while the weak does not. This result is robust to the variation of the time horizon. (JEL C73, C91)     

Conciliation: A New Approach to Family Conflict Resolution

Summary This article criticises the traditional ‘adversarial’approach to divorce and argues for new methods of conflict resolutionto reduce the destructive impact of divorce on the family asa whole, and to give higher priority to the needs of children.These methods need to be developed in conjunction with lawyers,so that conciliation can be integrated with legal proceedingsarising from separation and divorce. The article discusses therelevance of conciliation to different forms of marital breakdown,and attempts to define some of the main elements of the conciliationprocess.