Research Center Events

NYU Stern Hosts Sixth Marketing Dynamics Conference

Bringing together scholars and practitioners from around the US and countries as far reaching as Germany, Turkey and New Zealand, the Sixth Annual Marketing Dynamics Conference served as a forum to share and analyze some of the latest research in the field. Hosted at NYU Stern and organized by Professor Russell Winer, chair of Stern’s Marketing department, and Stern Marketing Professor Vishal Singh, the three-day conference convened close to 100 attendees from top universities including NYU, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford and Yale from August 27–29.

Throughout the conference, attendees heard from leading researchers on a wide array of areas in the marketing discipline including research methodology, e-commerce, advertising, new products and their adoption, the pharmaceutical industry, dynamic pricing, structural models and market entry.

Stern Professor Tülin Erdem identified two avenues for future development in the field: dynamics of decision-making (on the firm and consumer levels) and dynamics of marketing effects. Describing several elements that affect forward-looking consumer decisions, Professor Erdem touched upon concepts that warrant further research including trade-offs, stockpiling, consumer learning models, technology adoption and how to estimate the discount factor. Switching focus to forward-looking firm decisions, she pointed to two areas in need of further research – evaluation of the total effects of marketing investments and understanding firm competition. She underlined the importance of accounting for several other dynamic marketing effects, such as habit persistence (when consumers develop routine behaviors), consumer learning about product attributes (e.g., gas mileage of a motor vehicle) and consumer price sensitivity (i.e., consumers tend to be less sensitive to price hikes as their income increases).

During a panel on dynamic learning models, Stern Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang shared two pieces of recent research.

In his joint study with Sang Pil Han of NYU, Professor Ghose studied how consumers access social networking sites (e.g., Facebook) and portal websites (e.g., Google) using their smart phones. They examined how users, who are learning via direct experience versus word-of-mouth input, are influenced by the quality of content, the assimilation of content to the user’s taste, the fees associated with usage as well as uncertainty about the aforementioned factors.

Professor Yang, along with co-authors Yi Zhao of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Daeyoung Koh of Seoul National University, looked into consumer decision-making on the household level. Exploring the correlation between consumer decisions of husbands and wives, the researchers developed a model that can be used to help predict the decisions of consumers who are influenced by the experiences and viewpoints of family members.

“Having a forum for scholars and practitioners to exchange ideas and hear about the latest research in marketing, which has implications for consumer brands, manufacturing companies, technology firms and more, is critical to propelling the field forward,” said Professor Russell Winer.

The Seventh Marketing Dynamics Conference is scheduled to take place June 21-23, 2010, in Istanbul, Turkey, at Őzyeğin University.

Read more about the Sixth Marketing Dynamics Conference