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Target selection models play an important role in business practice. They are the data-mining methods that enable firms to conduct market segmentation. Marketers apply them to customer databases to identify the profiles of consumers who are most interested in a particular offer or marketing proposition. However, both the marketing and data-mining literature indicate that there is inadequate research that compares target selection models in order to help practitioners understand how to apply them. With respect to this, the focus of this study is to provide guidance on the implementation of a collection of target selection models and to assess their comparative performance with regard to their practical usefulness. This study assesses the relative performance of the methods cluster analysis alongside multiple dicsriminant analysis (MDA), Chi-square automatic interaction detector (CHAID) and expert systems in predicting the weekly expenditure of grocery products of 9,854 consumers in the UK and develops a new approach based on fuzzy expert systems. The comparison of these methods is conducted by using three criteria (parity test, hit rate and lift charts) and one validation method (M-fold cross-validation). The results suggest that these methods vary in performance across different criteria. Overall, CHAID and fuzzy expert systems outperformed cluster analysis alongside MDA in terms of classification accuracy (parity test and the hit rate), moreover, as far as practical applicability is concerned (lift charts), no clear conclusions could be drawn between CHAID and cluster analysis alongside MDA on which of the two is best, while expert systems performed last. Furthermore, from the findings mentioned and from the empirical application of the methods examined, conclusions are derived on the features of their processes that affect their practical usefulness and on the way they should be implemented.

This thesis investigates the impact of credit ratings on UK firms' debt maturity and ownership decisions. Two unique datasets, which combine the credit ratings data obtained from Financial Times Credit Ratings International, UK firms’ private debt data collected from their annual reports, and the accounting/market data obtained from DataStream, are created for the empirical investigations. The results show that there is a non-monotonic relationship between UK firms' credit rating status and their debt maturity. Firms with A-/A3 or higher ratings and firms with "speculative-grade” ratings use around 10% less long-term debt than firms with BBB- /Baa3 to BBB+/Baa1 ratings. In addition, downgraded firms are more likely to lengthen their debt maturity ex-post, regardless of their ex-ante credit ratings. The results also show that there is a monotonically decreasing relationship between UK firms' credit rating status and their use of bank and non-bank private debt. Even after controlling for other common determinants of debt ownership structure, a one-notch decrease in credit rating is likely to cause a 2 to 4 percent increase in the use of bank borrowing and other forms of private debt. The results from the full sample of downgraded firms show that ex post, these firms immediately increase their bank borrowing, possibly through their pre-arranged lines of credit agreements. However, the results from a sub-sample of firms being downgraded from the BBB/Baa rating category to "speculative-grade" ratings show that ex post, these firms’ bank borrowing is immediately reduced. Such a quick reduction is more likely to be the result of bank actions.