PhD Marketing Courses
MKTG 641. Behavioral Research in Marketing I
This course prepares the student to do empirical behavioral research on consumer and managerial behavior and other behavioral issues. It will cover some of the key concepts, principles, and techniques of behavioral research, with emphasis on experimental and non-experimental design.
MKTG 642. Behavioral Research in Marketing II: Consumer Behavior
The major goals of this seminar are to (1) provide Ph.D.-level coverage of the major research work carried out in consumer behavior, (2) expose students to the cutting edge in consumer behavior, psychology and neuroscience and (3) give students a good grasp of what it takes to be a successful academic in the field of consumer behavior.
MKTG 643. Product Planning Seminar
This seminar examines useful quantitative models and methods relevant to product planning and pricing, and promotion. Topics include conjoint analysis and measurement of multiattribute preference structures, LOGIT choice models, information search, product positioning, brand and customer equity, new product introduction, market structuring, and new product diffusion. Not taught in 2009-10.
MKTG 644. Quantitative Research in Marketing: Strategic Models and Methods
This seminar will review major contributions and recent developments in marketing with a particular emphasis on the strategic interactions between firms. We will examine how firms craft their product, pricing, advertising, sales force, and channel strategies to create and sustain competitive advantage. A main purpose of the course is to generate new ideas, new research topics, and new applications for existing concepts and theories. Not taught in 2009-10.
MKTG 645. Empirical Analysis of Dynamic Decision Context
This course will focus on empirical tools for analyzing dynamic decision contexts, wherein current actions of firms or consumers have effects on future payoffs, profits and/or competitive conduct. The course will build the relevant material generally, but the applications will be mostly focused on empirical marketing and industrial organization problems. The course will have an applied focus overall, emphasizing the practical aspects of implementation, especially programming. The overall aim of the class is to help students obtain the skills to implement these methods in their research. The course starts with an overview of consumer theory and static models of consumer choice. It then builds on this material and introduce discrete choice markovian decision problems, and continuous markovian decision problems, and focus on building the computational toolkit for the numerical analysis of these problems. The course then moves on to specific applications, and discuss multi-agent dynamic equilibrium models. Finally, the course will discuss recently proposed advanced methods for alleviating computational burden in dynamic models.
MKTG 646. Bayesian Inference: Methods and Applications
The course aims to develop a thorough understanding of Bayesian inference, with a special focus on empirical applications in marketing. The course will start with a brief theoretical foundation to Bayesian inference and will subsequently focus on empirical methods. Initial topics would include Bayesian linear regression, multivariate regression, importance sampling and its applications. Subsequently, the course will focus on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods including the Gibbs Sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and their applications. The overall focus of the course will be on applying these methods for empirical research using a programming language such as R.
MKTG 648.Culture and Persuasion
Objectives are to (1) familiarize students with research in cultural psychology, particularly in the context of consumer behavior, and (2) build a set of academic-oriented skills (e.g., critical thinking, presentations, review process, creating hypotheses and testing them creatively). Specifically, the focus is on understanding current theoretical and methodological approaches to various aspects of culture and persuasion, as well as advancing this knowledge by developing testable hypotheses and theoretical perspectives that build on the current knowledge base. The content of the course (e.g., readings) represent basic and recent work in cultural psychology and related disciplines (psychology, anthropology and sociology). Not taught in 2009-10.
MKTG 661. Attitudes and Persuasion
This course will provide an overview of recent research on attitudes and persuasion. Content will include broad coverage of the issues of major importance to attitude theory, but will focus on more recent issues and controversies that have captured the interest of researchers in the field. The class will cover research areas such as attitude change, persuasion, and resistance processes; implicit versus explicit attitudes; attitude certainty; cognitive versus affective influences; dissonance and attitudinal ambivalence; selective exposure and biased processing; metacognition; and others. Students who take this course will become familiar with research methods and major issues in attitudes research and will have a better understanding of how individuals form, maintain, and change their evaluations. Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to critique existing research and formulate new research ideas.