Employing a recommendation expert system based on mental accounting and artificial neural networks into mining business intelligence for study abroad’s P/S recommendations

Successfully designing and positioning product/service will lead most enterprises to have the chance to keep the competitive advantages, and consumers also will have clear and strong preferences for product/service (P/S) during competitive environment. At Taiwan, study abroad service which being provided by travel agencies can be viewed as a new market during the recent years. Most travel agencies intend to develop the novel techniques and mine the useful business intelligence (BI) for improving their quality of P/S or adjusting their strategies of marketing. In this article, a recommendation expert system (ES) based on mental accounting and artificial neural networks (ANNs) is proposed to address the issue of BI mining. The travel agencies can obtain BI relating to consumers’ decision-making, consumers’ responses for different mental accounting and the recommended features for P/S by inputting referenced information into such recommendation ES. Finally, we also take an illustrative example owing to a local travel agency at Taiwan to demonstrate the feasibility and rationality of the proposed architecture.