Abstract: A technique for customizing purchase incentives, such as discount coupons and the like, based on whether a consumer buys a promoted item or a competitive item, and on the price of the promoted item relative to the competitive item. The invention identifies promoted or competitive products in a consumer's order, and selects an incentive that is appropriate for the price differential between the promoted and competitive items, and for the purchase choice already made between the promoted and competitive items. a different incentive is provided for the different pricing and choice combinations, in an effort to maximize sales for the promoted item, and the different incentives are stored in an incentive matrix accessed by product purchased and by consumer profile as determined from whether the consumer bought the more expensive item, the less expensive item, or one of two equally priced items.

Abstract: An apparatus for analyzing telephone billing data to produce augmented billings and reports on calls to classes of telephone numbers selected by the user, such as to calls not on a list of authorized telephone numbers or calls not fulfilling some other predetermined criterion, includes data reading, selecting, and storing means capable of obtaining telephone directory and billing data in machine manipulatable form, comparing means for finding matches between sets of data as well as tracking failures to match, and data combining and outputting means for producing useful reports. External directory information database searching means are provided for matching billing data not matched with the internally stored directory data. Means are also provided for creating a secondary directory of data extracted from previously matched billing data to increase the efficiency of processing of subsequent billing data sets.