Marketing professors from around the world came together recently for a three-day conference hosted by the Naveen Jindal School of Management to share ideas on quantitative research related to emerging marketing trends.
The Jindal School presented the 15th Annual Frank M. Bass – UT Dallas Frontiers of Research in Marketing Science Conference from Feb. 25 through Feb. 27. The event, held virtually this year because of the global pandemic, honors the memory of the late Dr. Frank M. Bass (1926-2006), Eugene McDermott Chair in the Jindal School, who for a quarter of a century led the way in establishing marketing as a quantitative science.
Dr. Nanda S. Kumar, professor of marketing in the Jindal School, organized the conference. He said 125 faculty members from various universities and 70 doctoral students registered to attend.
“This was by far the largest conference we have hosted in the last 15 years,” he said.
Dr. Ying Xie, coordinator of the Marketing Area at the Jindal School, said the purpose of this conference is to foster high-quality research in quantitative approaches to marketing and provide a forum for a stimulating exchange of ideas.
“Every year we have a selection committee consisting of well-known marketing academics,” Xie said. “They are in charge of screening all submitted papers and deciding which papers will be selected to be presented at the conference.”
Kumar said that participants spanned the globe — including South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Australia, Portugal, Germany, the United Kingdom and all time zones in the United States.
“Broadly, the quantitative methodology adopted by the authors selected for the conference this year can be categorized in three areas — applied economic theory and game theory; empirical methodology, such as statistical and econometric models and machine learning; and experiments — both in the lab and the field,” he said. “The topics analyzed using these methodologies are varied, ranging from privacy issues, advertising, pricing, promotions” and more.
Dr. Varghese Jacob, Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair and the Jindal School’s vice dean, opened the conference with a welcome message and an homage to the conference’s namesake.
“I hope Frank is pleased to see, wherever he might be, that the tradition continues,” he said. “The school has basically adopted the culture he, [Dr.] Ram [Rao] and others … advocated maybe several decades ago. “The research culture Bass envisioned “ is pretty much ingrained in the school,” Jacob said, “and has become vital — I mean I would say it is part of the DNA of the school.”
Dr. Pradeep Chintagunta, the Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, served as keynote speaker. His presentation, “Analytics for Good,” focused on the work he did in Rwanda providing business analytics tools to small-business owners who wanted to grow their businesses to determine what effect doing so would have on their bottom lines.
Tongil (TI) Kim, an assistant professor in marketing, was a discussant at the conference. He said he always says yes to these types of invitations because it is a great way to learn about others’ work in detailed ways and familiarize himself with a stream of literature that he wants to know more about.
“My main takeaway from this conference is that there is a lot of interesting, thought-provoking research happening all around the world despite the pandemic,” he said. “We had topics ranging from consumer data privacy, advertising, pricing, firm competition, large-scale field experiment, gender and inequality, retail, healthcare and public policy. Marketing plays a role in all these different aspects of our daily life, and it was great to hear top-notch research on such a variety of topics in a single conference. The last takeaway is we all miss in-person conferences, and hopefully we can have our in-person Bass Conference back next year.”
