Marketing Workshop

August 20th- 23rd, 2007

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CKGSB, Guanghua, and Wharton

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Objectives

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The four day seminar in quantative marketing is jointly sponsored by CKGSB, Guanghua, and Wharton.'||'&'||'nbsp; The seminar'||'&'||'nbsp; is designed with two objectives in mind.'||'&'||'nbsp; First, the seminar provides an in-depth survey of many substantive topics in marketing that are amenable to economic or econometric modeling and analysis.'||'&'||'nbsp; Through the survey, participants will be brought to the frontier of marketing research, gain a better appreciation of quantitative research methodologies, and develop their own research interests.'||'&'||'nbsp; Second, the seminar is designed to familiarize participants with some of the commonly used models and techniques in quantitative marketing research and to provide participants with some hands-on experience with economic and econometric modeling.

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Course Requirements

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The seminar is designed for PHD students and young professors with interests in quantative marketing research.'||'&'||'nbsp; You need to have some basic training in calculus and statistics to appreciate the contents of the seminar.'||'&'||'nbsp; In addition, three weeks before the start of the program, you need to submit an one-page writeup describing a research topic you are working on. You need to provide some details about what ideas you hope to develop, how you plan to conduct analysis (economic modeling or statistical analysis), what kind of data you have, etc. We will select a few projects to discuss during the four-day seminar to help you advance your project.'||'&'||'nbsp; This assignment is, of course, voluntary and you can opt out partially or completely.

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Seminar Contents

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Day 1:'||'&'||'nbsp; Prof. Zhang Zhong will discuss some basic concepts of Game theory and some of'||'&'||'nbsp; its applications in marketing. Concretely, we will first discuss the concept of a game, the definition of an equilibrium, equilibrium refinements, Cournot, Bertrand, and Stackelberg games, and the Hotelling model.'||'&'||'nbsp; Then, we will illustrate how these simple game theory concepts can help us to shed light on substantive issues in marketing such as sales promotions, product differentiation, product positioning and targeted pricing.

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Day 2: Prof. Baohong Sun will introduce econometric modeling in marketing. Her focus will be on disaggregate (i.e. individual level) models of consumer preference and choice.'||'&'||'nbsp; The thrust of research in this area is to understand, explain and predict the behavior of consumers and the nature of markets. The topics of discussion will include: choice models in marketing, modeling consumer unobserved heterogeneity, modeling state dependence, models of consideration set formation and choice set,'||'&'||'nbsp; integrated models to incorporate purchase incidence, brand choice and purchase quantity, cross-category analysis '||'&'||'amp; basket choice, consumer decision-making under uncertainty '||'&'||'amp; forward-looking consumers, structural analysis vs reduced form approaches, and application of choice models in CRM.

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Day 3: Prof. Yuxin Chen will return to the topic of analytical modeling approaches and techniques. His focus is on how to select interesting research topics and ask relevant research questions and how to build up an analytical model once a research topic is selected and the related research questions are decided. These discussions will help participants to acquire the basic skills of constructing analytical models for their own projects or research ideas, which can potentially lead to publication at top marketing journals. These discussions will be illustrated with well-known models in the