Patent ID: 8244571

Claim:
A method in a computing system for constructing a demand generation equation to predict the level of demand for an offering that will be generated by allocating particular levels of resources to different marketing activities, comprising: receiving a plurality of observations from a user; for each of at least two of the plurality of observations: for each of a plurality of candidate driver variables, retrieving a value for the candidate driver variable as it relates to the observation; for each of at least one outcome variable, retrieving a value for the outcome variable as it relates to the observation; using the variable values retrieved for the observations, estimating an equation that relates the candidate driver variables to the outcome variable to produce coefficients for each of the candidate driver variables, wherein the estimating is performed using a generalized least-squares technique; and conducting statistical diagnostics on the estimated equation to validate the estimated equation, wherein conducting statistical diagnostics on the estimated equation to validate the estimated equation comprises requiring that the estimated equation fall within the range of elasticity norms from an elasticity library.