William N. McPhee. Formal Theories of Mass Behavior. Free Press, 1963.
Andrew Ehrenberg, Gerald Goodhardt and Patrick Barwise. “Double Jeopardy Revisited.” Journal of Marketing 54(3), 1990. Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Oxford University Press, 2010. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, on acquisition and retention (Riebe et al., Journal of Business Research, 2014).
Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky and Yuhuang Zheng. “The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected.” Journal of Marketing Research 43(1), 2006. The goal-gradient idea goes back to Clark L. Hull, “The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis and Maze Learning,” Psychological Review 39(1), 1932.
Michael Lewis. “Customer Acquisition Promotions and Customer Asset Value.” Journal of Marketing Research 43(2), 2006. Eric T. Anderson and Duncan I. Simester. “Long-Run Effects of Promotion Depth on New Versus Established Customers.” Marketing Science 23(1), 2004.
This is one chapter of The Whole Machine, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.