Intelligent Decision Support Systems in Marketing

In this chapter, we examine a recent class of systems that have the ability to process data and then by using reasoning to transform them into opinions, judgments, evaluations, and advises. With these systems the capability of reasoning is added to the functionality of the DSS, thus giving the ability to provide advises to specialized problems. Their focus is to support their users into the problem solving process rather than to substitute humans in decision-making. This new type of systems is the result of the cooperation of expert systems and decision support systems. The role of the ESs is to provide their heuristic reasoning and explanatory capabilities while DSS contribute with their analytical procedures and data management (Ford, 1985; Turban and Watkins, 1986; Henderson, 1987; Doukidis, 1988; Holtzman, 1989; Moore, 1992; Turban, 1993).