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Marketing group participates in the 2023 Marketing Science conference

A delegation of 10 Chileans, eight of whom are directly or indirectly linked to our department, participated in the 45th version of the Marketing Science Conference. The meeting was hosted by the University of Miami, United States, between June 8 and 10.

Gone are the days when our participation in this conference was reduced to one researcher. Andrés Musalem, an academic from our department and a member of the marketing group -along with Marcel Goic, Omar Pérez and Daniel Schwartz- recalls that in 2003 he went to his first Marketing Science Conference “and I was the only Chilean researcher”.

20 years later, Musalem was part of a contingent of 10 Chilean researchers from the marketing area who attended this meeting; eight of them related to our department (as current or former faculty or alumni), transforming the University of Chile as one of the establishments with the greatest presence in this event.

“This conference is probably the most important for researchers working on quantitative marketing issues, that is, applying artificial intelligence, statistics, econometrics and game theory to the study of marketing problems. In it, the latest advances in the area are discussed and the importance of social issues is increasingly appreciated. For example, there were sessions dedicated to the use (positive and negative) of social networks”, highlights Musalem.

Marcel Goic, also an Industrial Engineering academic and part of the group that attended, complements: “This conference is one of the most important in the discipline of quantitative marketing and we see with pride how the group of Chileans has such an important participation. On the one hand, we have a recognized position in the scientific community and several colleagues greet us graciously as ‘the Chileans’. On the other hand, it is very gratifying to see how the community has grown, where the vast majority of researchers have a close original relationship with our department”.

Presentations:

The 2023 version of this conference, the first in face-to-face format after the pandemic, not only brought together researchers from three Chilean universities, but also from top-level universities/schools (Harvard and London Business School).

Isamar Troncoso, a former student of our department and today a professor at Harvard University, comments: “This is one of the largest conferences in our discipline, where a variety of recent projects supported by a wide range of methodologies are presented; from more traditional econometric models to cutting-edge artificial intelligence methods. These address a variety of marketing-related issues, such as consumer intelligence, analysis of political preferences, social impact and much more.

She adds: “Personally, since I have been abroad, this meeting has become a very good opportunity to keep in touch with prominent Chilean researchers. Many of them inspired me to pursue an academic career and to keep up with the issues they are working on.”

Here is a list of the presentations:

“Robotics lot and Point of Sales Data to Measure the Impact of Shelf Position on Sales”, Andrés Musalem and Sofia Pontigo.

“Comparing Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling and Machine Learning Approaches for Prescriptive Analysis on Multiproduct Pricing Optimization”, Luis Aburto, Marcel Goic and Xavier Zuazagoitia.

“Advertising to Businesses: An Experimental Investigation”, Michael Thomas, Marcel Goic and Kirthi Kalyanam.

“Using Meta-Learning in Automatic Demand Forecasts with a Large Number of Products”, Marcel Goic and Luis Gutiérrez.

“The Effect of Pregnancy and Childbirth on Consumption Behavior”, Verónica Díaz, Ricardo Montoya and Oded Netzer.

“Unified Marketing Measurement Under Privacy Regulations”, Ryan Dew and Nicolás Padilla.

“How Do 3d Virtual Tours Affect Home Sale Outcomes?”, Isamar Troncoso and Mengxia Zhang.

“Effect of the Expert’s Review on Experience Goods Consumption”, Qiao Gong, Tony Ke and Francisco Cisternas.

On the Interaction Between Television and Branded Search Advertising and Its Implications for Real-Time Syncing”, Iván A. Guitart and Guillaume Hervet.

“Polarized Nation, or Not? An Empirical Investigation Wether and How Brands´ Sociopolitical Stands Shape Customer Store Visits”, Tal Shoshani, Ignacio Riveros and Lan Luo.

Works of our academics:

In “Robotics lot and Point of Sales Data to Measure the Impact of Shelf Position on Sales”, Andrés Musalem and Sofia Pontigo use data collected through robots that navigate supermarket aisles detecting the position of each product on the shelf.

“By combining this data with sales information, we estimate the impact on sales of placing a product in different positions on the shelf,” explains Musalem.

He adds: “One of our somewhat counterintuitive findings is that products positioned just below eye height exhibit an advantage over products positioned at other levels.”

“Using Meta-Learning in Automatic Demand Forecasts with a Large Number of Products”, Marcel Goic and Luis Gutiérrez.

In this Project, Goic says, they use machine learning algorithms to determine which demand forecast approach is best suited to each product (depending on intrinsic characteristics of the historical series).

“We tested this method in a regional supermarket chain and demonstrated that we can make forecasts of thousands of products with better results than those derived from the approaches traditionally used by the company”, says the researcher.

Goic also participates as a co-author in the projects “Comparing Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling and Machine Learning Approaches for Prescriptive Analysis on Multiproduct Pricing Optimization” and “Advertising to Businesses: An Experimental Investigation”.