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

This Ph.D. seminar provides coverage of the major research carried out in consumer research both in marketing and psychology. A vast set of topic will be covered including conscious and non-conscious consumer goals, motivations, emotions, attention and perception and consumer decision processes. The course will help students hone their ability to conceptualize, operationalize, and develop research idea and will provide a 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. The course requirements include class discussion and a research proposal developing a new idea or a new application of existing theories and methods.

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 and consumers. We will examine how firms craft their product, pricing, advertising, salesforce, and channel strategies to create and sustain competitive advantage. We will also discuss how consumers react to different firm strategies mentioned above. A main purpose of the course is to generate new ideas, new research topics, and new applications for existing concepts and theories.

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 our applications will be mostly focused on empirical marketing and industrial organization problems. We 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. By the end of the class, students are expected to be able to formulate a dynamic decision problem, program it in a language such as Matlab or C, and to estimate the model from data. The course starts with an overview of consumer theory and static models of consumer choice. We build 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. We then move on to specific applications, and discuss multi-agent dynamic equilibrium models. Finally, we 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 you 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).

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.