This course covers some key topics at the research frontier in quantitative marketing. We start by formulating the marketing manager's data-based decision problem as a Normative statistical decision theory problem. We then formulate and estimate models of consumer decision-making grounded in microeconomics to determine the optimal marketing decision problem, even under fundamentally new, unobserved (counterfactual) market conditions. Topics include: Foundations of demand modeling, "consideration sets" and the role of information frictions that create a wedge between consumption utility and demand, the origin and evolution of preferences, state dependence in demand, dynamic discrete choice models, learning and memory models, storable goods demand, diffusion models and durable goods demand, stated choice models, and advertising dynamics.
This course is geared towards 2nd-year Ph.D. students who have already taken at least one course in Ph.D.-level Price Theory and in Ph.D.-level Empirical Economics.
