(PhD) Analytical Models

Analytical research in marketing usually consists of applied microeconomics and game theory models aimed at understanding real-world phenomena. This course will provide broad knowledge of many substantive topics in marketing that are amenable to economic modeling and analysis, including pricing, product design and positioning, promotions, advertising, distribution channels, salesforce compensation and interface of marketing with operations. This knowledge will help you to appreciate and critique some of the major streams of quantitative marketing research, and to develop your own research interests. The main learning vehicle will be reading, presenting and discussing papers. The focus will be on understanding the main idea(s) of a paper along with the key implementation details. In addition, we will solve some toy models in class to familiarize you with the mechanics of some widely used modeling paradigms in marketing, and give you a hands-on experience with the economic modeling of marketing phenomena. As theory underpins good non-theoretical research, this course will be useful to you even if you do not plan to conduct research in analytical modeling.