Eric Bradlow

University of Pennsylvania | UP · The Wharton School

This paper proposes a selection tool that jointly identifies the best-fitted granularity-model pair that can be used for out-of-sample forecasting.

Firms using online advertising regularly run experiments with multiple versions of their ads since they are uncertain about which ones are most effective. During a campaign, firms try to adapt to intermediate results of their tests, optimizing what they earn while learning about their ads. Yet how should they decide what percentage of impressions t...

We introduce a new methodology that can capture and explain differences across a series of cohorts of new customers in a repeat-transaction setting. More specifically, this new framework, which we call a vector changepoint model, exploits the underlying regime structure in a sequence of acquired customer cohorts to make predictive statements about...

Advances in data collection have made it increasingly easy to collect information on advertising exposures. However, translating this seemingly rich data into measures of advertising response has proven difficult, largely because of concerns that advertisers target customers with a higher propensity to buy or increase advertising during periods of...

In recent years, customer lifetime value (CLV) has gained increasing importance in both academia and practice. Although many advanced techniques have been proposed, the recency/frequency/monetary value (RFM) segmentation framework, and its related probability models, remain a CLV mainstay. In this article, we demonstrate the deficiency in RFM as a...

When managers and researchers encounter a data set, they typically ask two key questions: (1) Which model (from a candidate set) should I use? And (2) if I use a particular model, when is it going to likely work well for my business goal? This research addresses those two questions and provides a rule, i.e., a decision tree, for data analysts to po...

In recent years, growing attention has been placed on the increasing pattern of ‘clumpy data’ in many empirical areas such as financial market microstructure, criminology and seismology, and digital media consumption to name just a few; but a well-defined and careful measurement of clumpiness has remained somewhat elusive. The related ‘hot hand’ ef...

The van der Linden article (this issue) provides a roadmap for future research in equating. My belief is that the roadmap begins and ends with collecting auxiliary data that can be utilized to provide improved equating, especially when data are sparse or equating beyond simple moments is desired.

The canonical design of customer satisfaction surveys asks for global satisfaction with a product or service and for evaluations of its distinct attributes. Users of these surveys are often interested in the relationship between global satisfaction and ...

As firms collect greater amounts of data about their customers from an ever broader set of " touchpoints, " a new set of methodological challenges arises. Companies often collect data from these various platforms at differing levels of aggregation, and it is not clear how to merge these data sources to draw meaningful inferences about customer-leve...

We predict the popularity of short messages called tweets created in the micro-blogging site known as Twitter. We measure the popularity of a tweet by the time-series path of its retweets, which is when people forward the tweet to others. We develop a probabilistic model for the evolution of the retweets using a Bayesian approach, and form predicti...

Online advertisers regularly deliver several versions of display ads in a single campaign across many websites in order to acquire customers, but they are uncertain about which ads are most effective. As the campaign progresses, they adapt to intermediate results and allocate more impressions to the better performing ads on each website. But how sh...

New car purchases are among the largest and most expensive purchases consumers ever make. While functional and economic concerns are important, the authors examine whether visual influence also plays a role. Using a hierarchical Bayesian probability model and data on 1.6 million new cars sold over nine years, they examine how visual influence affec...

How do psychological processes shape how culture evolves? We investigated how a cultural item's popularity is shaped by the recent popularity of other items with features in common. Specifically, using more than 100 years of first-names data, we examined how a name's popularity is influenced by the popularity of that name's component phonemes in ot...

Customers often stockpile reward points in linear loyalty programs (i.e., programs that do not reward stockpiling) despite several economic incentives against doing so (e.g., the time value of money). We develop a mathematical model of redemption choice in which customers are assumed to evaluate the gains and losses of points separately from those...

In the aftermath of many natural and man-made disasters, people often wonder why those affected were underprepared, especially when the disaster was the result of known or regularly occurring hazards (e.g., hurricanes). We study one contributing factor: ...

We introduce a new methodology that can capture and explain differences across a series of cohorts of new customers in a repeat-transaction setting. More specifically, this new framework, which we call a vector changepoint model, exploits the underlying regime structure in a sequence of acquired customer cohorts, to make predictive statements about...

Organizations today have access to enormous data sets, and sophisticated business analytical tools are needed to harness the tremendous potential of these data to improve day-to-day decision making. To encourage further developments in this rapidly growing area of interdisciplinary research, Management Science will publish a special issue dedicated...

When managers and researchers encounter a dataset, they typically ask two key questions: (1) which model (from a candidate set) should be used? and (2) if I use a particular model, when is it going to likely work well for my business goal? This research addresses those two questions, and provides a rule for data analysts to portend the "winning mod...

We provide evidence that firms appoint independent directors who are overly sympathetic to management, while still technically independent according to regulatory definitions. We explore a subset of independent directors for whom we have detailed, microlevel ...

We gather detailed data on organizational practices and information technology (IT) use at 253 firms to examine the hypothesis that external focus---the ability of a firm to detect and therefore respond to changes in its external operating environment---increases ...

Many professions are plagued by disparities in service delivery. Racial disparities in policing, mortgage lending, and healthcare are some notable examples. Because disparities can result from a myriad of mechanisms, crafting effective disparity mitigation ...

Marketing researchers have become increasingly interested in spatial datasets. A main challenge of analyzing spatial data is that researchers must a priori choose the size and make-up of the areal units, hence the resolution of the analysis. Analyzing the data at a resolution that is too high may mask “macro” patterns, while analyzing the data at a...

A commonly used paradigm in modeling count data is to assume that individual counts are generated from a Binomial distribution, with probabilities varying between individuals according to a Beta distribution. The marginal distribution of the counts is then BetaBinomial. Bradlow, Hardie, and Fader (2002, p. 189) make use of polynomial expansions to...

To facilitate checking and improvement of a Bayesian model, we define an outlier as an observation or group of observations that is “surprising” relative to its predictive distribution, under the model, given the remainder of the data. Hence outlyingness can be measured by the posterior predictive case-deleted p-value of any interesting scalar summ...

This foreword and the subsequent four invited articles were commissioned by Eric T. Bradlow while Editorin-Chief of Marketing Science. The foreword was written in four parts; each part covers a different aspect of the Workshop on Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics. The workshop was cosponsored by Columbia Business School, Duke Unive...

Stand-alone marketing models are well-suited to deal with different behavioral features such as variation in transaction frequency (customer heterogeneity with latent classes), recency and attrition (“buy ‘till you die” models), and more general changes in customer transaction rates (hidden Markov models, HMMs). We unite these modeling approaches i...

Car purchases are among the largest and most expensive purchases consumers ever make. While functional and economic concerns are obviously important, we examine whether social influence also plays a role. Using a Bayesian probability model along with data on over 1.6 million cars sold over a nine-year period, we examine how social influence affects...

How does culture evolve? We use over 100 years of data on first name popularity in the US, as well as a natural experiment using hurricanes, to investigate whether the similarity between cultural items shapes their success. Names can be broken into phonetic parts, or phonemes, and controlling for prior popularity of a name itself (direct effects),...

Multiservice providers, such as telecommunication and financial service companies, can benefit from understanding how customers' service portfolios evolve over the course of their relationships. This can provide guidance for managerial issues such as customer valuation and predicting customers' future behavior, whether it is acquiring additional se...

Marketing Science greatly benefited from the admirable and fastidious efforts of more than 200 different individuals who provided manuscript reviews last year. Beyond those individuals already recognized on the editorial board, the editor-in-chief and guest editors of Marketing Science are indebted to the many guest area editors and ad hoc reviewer...

Market structure analysis is a basic pillar of marketing research. Classic challenges in marketing such as pricing, campaign management, brand positioning, and new product development are rooted in an analysis of product substitutes and complements inferred from market structure. In this paper, we present a method to support the analysis and visual...

It doesn’t take an academic paper to point out the prominence that companies like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc. have had on our popular culture today. Many see it as an efficient communication mechanism (Web 2.0 if you will) in comparison to email and static content postings which now, remarkably only 15 years later after the internet ’launch’,...

Extant preference measurement research, including conjoint analysis, is done in the isolation of one’s own mind. That is, it remains completely silent on the explicit influence of others in the formation of consumer preferences. This paper proposes a holistic framework of preference, PIE, as well as a measurement method to remedy this problem. The...

The nature of the interaction between manufacturers and retailers has received a great deal of empirical attention in the last 15 years. One major line of empirical research examines the balance of power between them and ranges from reduced form models quantifying aggregate profit and other related trends for manufacturers and retailers to structur...

In this paper we examine alternative measurement models for fitting data from health surveys. We show why a testlet-based latent trait model that includes covariate information, embedded within a fully Bayesian framework, can allow multiple simultaneous inferences and aid interpretation. We illustrate our approach with a survey of breast cancer sur...

Market structure analysis is a basic pillar of marketing research. Classic challenges in marketing such as pricing, campaign management, brand positioning, and new product development are rooted in an analysis of product substitutes and complements in the marketplace inferred from such structures. In this paper, we present a method to support the a...

We develop a structural demand model that captures the effect of out-of-stocks on customer choice. Our estimation method uses store-level data on sales and partial information on product availability. Our model allows for flexible substitution patterns which are based on utility maximization principles and can accommodate categorical and continuous...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services publicly reports so-called process performance at all U.S. hospitals, such as whether certain recommended treatments are given to specific types of patients. We examined whether hospital performance on key process indicators improved during the three years since this reporting began. We also studied wh...

Purpose – Retail buyers' decisions result in billions of dollars of merchandise being purchased and offered for sale by retailers around the world. At present, retail buyers do not appear to be adequately harnessing consumer input to improve their forecasts. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by introducing a new approach involving...

In this paper, we study the targeting of advertising for the largest media expenditure for most firms—television. While television advertising was once used to "broadcast" to the widest possible audience, today with the explosion of channels and show content, it has the potential to be targeted to a narrower audience. In this paper, we investigate...

To facilitate checking and improvement of a Bayesian model, we define an outlier as an observation or group of observations that is "surprising" relative to its predictive distribution, under the model, given the remainder of the data. Hence outlyingness can be measured by the posterior predictive case-deleted p-value of any interesting scalar summ...

The nature of the interaction between manufacturers and retailers has received a great deal of empirical attention in the last 15 years. One major line of empirical research examines the balance of power between them and ranges from reduced form models quantifying aggregate profit and other related trends for manufacturers and retailers to structur...

Recent trends in marketing have demonstrated an increased focus on in-store expenditures with the hope of “grabbing consumers” at the point of purchase: but does it make sense? To help answer this question, the authors examine the interplay between in-store and out-of-store factors on consumer attention to and evaluation of brands displayed on supe...

We examine three sets of established behavioral hypotheses about consumers' in-store behavior using field data on grocery store shopping paths and purchases. Our results provide field evidence for the following empirical regularities. First, as consumers spend more time in the store, they become more purposeful—they are less likely to spend time on...

Using a unique data set that documented the hourly web-surfing behavior of over 140,000 Internet users in five southeastern states in August 2005, we explore the dynamics of information gathering as Hurricane Katrina developed and then hit South Florida and the Northern Gulf Coast. Using both elementary statistical methods and advanced techniques f...

No abstract available.

This paper compares the behavior of individuals playing a classic two-person deterministic prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game with choice data obtained from repeated interdependent security prisoner’s dilemma games with varying probabilities of loss and the ability to learn (or not learn) about the actions of one’s counterpart, an area of recent interest...

We propose a new alternative preference measurement method, barter conjoint, to contrast with traditional choice-based conjoint (CBC) approaches. Barter conjoint collects a substantially larger amount of data compared to CBC and allows for information diffusion among respondents. We conducted two empirical studies that compare CBC (with and without...

When a firm allows the return of previously purchased merchandise, it provides customers with an option that has measurable value. Whereas the option to return merchandise leads to an increase in gross revenue, it also creates additional costs. Selecting ...

We examine grocery shopping paths using the traveling salesman problem (TSP) as a normative frame of reference. We define the TSP-path for each shopper as the shortest path that connects all of his purchases. We then decompose the length of each observed path into three components: the length of the TSP-path, the additional distance because of (i.e...

No abstract available.

This article discusses the use of Bayesian methods for estimating logit demand models using aggregate data. We analyze two different demand systems: independent samples and consumer panel. Under the first system, there is a different and independent random sample of N consumers in each period and each consumer makes only a single purchase decision....

Virtual advisors often increase sales for those customers who find such online advice to be convenient and helpful. However, other customers take a more active role in their purchase decisions and prefer more detailed data. In general, we expect that ...

Many data sets, from different and seemingly unrelated marketing domains, all involve paths—records of consumers' movements in a spatial configuration. Path data contain valuable information for marketing researchers because they describe how consumers interact with their environment and make dynamic choices. As data collection technologies improve...

Understanding how customers' service portfolios evolve over the course of their relationship can provide multi-service firms, such as telecommunication and financial service providers, with useful guidance for managerial issues such as customer valuation and targeting. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that ownership of individual services...

Quality measures may be associated with improved outcomes for two reasons. First, measured activities may directly improve care. Second, success on these measures may be a marker for other unmeasured aspects of high quality care. Our objective is to test the contribution of both possible effects. 2004 Medicare data on hospital performance from Hosp...

Two widely recognized components, central to the calculation of customer value, are acquisition and retention propensities. However, while extant research has incorporated such components into different types of models, limited work has investigated the kinds of associations that may exist between them. In this research, we focus on the relationshi...

is an Assistant Professor of Statistics, Justin Wolfers (jwolfers@wharton.upenn.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Business and Public Policy, and Adi J. Wyner (ajw@wharton.upenn.edu) is an Associate Professor of Statistics, all at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. All correspondence on this manuscript should be sent to Eric T. B...

In the course of screening a form of a medical licensing exam for items that function differentially (DIF) between men and women, the authors used the traditional Mantel-Haenszel (MH) statistic for initial screening and a Bayesian method for deeper analysis. For very easy items, the MH statistic unexpectedly often found DIF where there was none. Th...

We introduce the work of the finalists in the 2006 ISMS Practice Prize Competition, representing outstanding examples of rigor plus relevance in our profession. The winner, describing a collaboration between J.D. Power and Associates and U.C. Riverside, ...

The widespread popularity and use of both the Poisson and the negative binomial models for count data arise, in part, from their derivation as the number of arrivals in a given time period assuming exponentially distributed interarrival times (without and with heterogeneity in the underlying base rates, respectively). However, with that clean theor...

I write this editorial to point out a recent "research trilogy" in Marketing Science that shows the scientific process (and author efforts) at its best. In particular, in 2005, an article (the first of the trilogy) was published in Marketing Science, by Besanko, Dubé, and Gupta (hereafter BDG), that focused on the issue of cross- brand retail pass-...

Abstract We develop a structural demand model that captures the eect,of out-of-stocks on customer behavior that can be estimated,using data commonly,and easily available to a store manager. Our model allows for flexible substitution patterns which are based on utility maximization,principles and can accommodate categorical and continuous product ch...

Increasingly, quality improvement initiatives emphasize public reporting of hospital performance measures, to encourage providers to improve, to help consumers pick providers, and to determine provider payments. Although these measures are based on compliance with well-established processes of care, it is unknown whether quality measured in this wa...

Service churn and retention rates remain central as constructs in marketing activities, such as valuation of service subscribers and resource allocation. Although extant approaches have been proposed to relate service churn to external factors, such as reported satisfaction, marketing-mix activities, and so on, managers often face situations in whi...

Modern businesses routinely capture data on millions of observations across subjects, brand SKUs, time periods, predictor variables, and store locations, thereby generating massive high-dimensional datasets. For example, Netflix has choice data on billions of movies selected, user ratings, and geodemographic characteristics. Similar datasets emerge...

We identify gaps and propose several directions for future research in preference measurement. We structure our argument around a framework that views preference measurement as comprising three interrelated components: (1) the problem that the study is ultimately intended to address; (2) the design of the preference measurement task and the data co...

This is our journal, not my journal. At times, we may try what seemingly are "crazy ideas." Some, indeed, may not work. However, please be assured that my goals are the same as yours: publishing great papers, providing fair and constructive feedback to authors, and making the field even stronger than it is. You will constantly be asked for your ide...

Marketing Science, in collaboration with the Informs Society on Marketing Science (ISMS), announces a new type of authored submission---the database report. Marketing Science will consider the publication of submitted databases. The same standards will apply to these detached databases as for the data employed in submitted manuscripts.

We examine grocery shopping paths using the traveling salesman problem (TSP) as a normative frame of reference. We define the TSP-path for each shopper as the shortest path that connects all of his purchases. We then decompose the length of each observed path into three components: the length of the TSP-path, the additional distance because of (i.e...

Service churn and retention rates remain central as constructs in marketing activities, such as valuation of service subscribers and resource allocation. Although extant approaches have been proposed to relate service churn to external factors, such as reported satisfaction, marketing-mix activities, and so on, managers often face situations in whi...

In this article, the authors propose a Bayesian method for estimating disaggregate choice models using aggregate data. Compared with existing methods, the advantage of the proposed method is that it allows for the analysis of microlevel consumer dynamic behavior, such as the impact of purchase history on current brand choice, when only aggregate-le...

Most researchers in the Marketing literature have typically relied on disaggregate data (e.g., consumer panel) to estimate the behavioral and managerial implications of coupon promotions. In this article, we propose the use of individual-level Bayesian methods for studying this problem when only aggregate data on consumer choices (market share) and...

We examine three sets of established behavioral hypotheses about consumers’ in‐store behavior using field data on grocery store shopping paths and purchases. Our results provide field evidence for the following empirical regularities. First, as consumers spend more time in the store, they become more purposeful—they are less likely to spend...

Surgeons select medical instruments without comparative performance data. This analysis seeks to determine if suture and endo-mechanical products made by different vendors have equivalent performance profiles or are clearly distinguished by physicians on different dimensions. A sample of 45 surgeons evaluated eight vendors of five categories of sut...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

Letters Section Editor: Robert M. Golub, MD, Senior Editor.

A sequence of bids in Internet auctions can be viewed as record-breaking events in which only those data points that break the current record are observed. We investigate stochastic versions of the classical record-breaking problem for which we apply Bayesian estimation to predict observed bids and bid times in Internet auctions. Our approach to ad...

U.S. expenditures on medical devices (US dollars 70 billion in 2003) are one of the fastest growing components of hospital costs. Physicians' selection of medical devices lacks an evidence base on the comparative clinical effectiveness of these products. Comparative studies (e.g., vendor 1 versus vendor 2, technology A versus technology B) are incr...

The article discusses a parsimonious decision-path model of visual attention and brand consideration to demonstrate how eye-tracking data can be utilized to drive a brand's consideration into its memory-based baseline and its visual lift. It also provides insights into the decision-making process of consumers at the point of purchase, specifically...

We propose a new data collection mechanism (barter markets), as an alternative to conjoint analysis, that allows for information diffusion among respondents, as an accelerated method to capture real life learning and measurement of consumer’s partworths for product features. An empirical study that compares the barter method and choice-based conjoi...

In 1987, Wainer and Kiely proposed a name for a packet of test items that are administered together; they called such an aggregation a "testlet." Testlets had been in existence for a long time prior to 1987, albeit without this euphonious appellation. They had typically been used to boost testing efficiency in situations that examined an individual...

In response to concerns about the quality of care in US hospitals, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began measuring hospital performance and reporting this performance on their Web site, Hospital Compare. It is unknown whether these process performance measures are related to hospital-level outcomes. To determine whether quality measure...

Retail buyers ' forecasts, decisions, and subsequent purchases result in billions of dollars of merchandise being purchased and offered for sale by retailers around the world. However, academic research examining this decision process has been limited, and recommendations for improvement almost nonexistent. In the present study, we begin to ad...

Trust is critical for organizations, effective management, and efficient negotiations, yet trust violations are common. Prior work has often assumed trust to be fragile-easily broken and difficult to repair. We investigate this proposition in a laboratory study and find that trust harmed by untrustworthy behavior can be effectively restored when in...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

In many different managerial contexts, customers leave money on the table by, for example, their failure to claim rebates, use available coupons, and so on. This project focuses on a related problem faced by homeowners who may be reluctant to file insurance claims despite the fact their losses are covered. I model this consumer decision by introduc...

This research presents a feature-based statistical model and subsequently explores the degree to which similarity perceptions between two advertisements can be decomposed and explained by a “weighted-andsummed” distance measure, computed on the advertisements’ executional elements, after controlling for familiarity and viewers’ attitudinal response...