Marketing Analytics, Spring 2021

15.819 Marketing Analytics, Spring 2022

I’m teaching a course at MIT Sloan this Spring on using and managing analysis of quantitative data to inform, make, and even automate marketing decisions. The goal of this course is to give students the expertise to initiate, participate in, manage, and evaluate marketing analytics efforts with substantial business impact.

The Internet industry has led in both the availability and use of behavioral data, so I will draw on my experiences there, but we will apply many course ideas to other industries.

Check out last year’s syllabus here.

Algorithmic transparency and assessing effects of algorithmic ranking.
Testimony before the US Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband.
This addresses the questions: How does algorithmic ranking in social media work? How can we assess algorithmic impact & amplification? What can policy-makers do here?

Providing normative information increases intentions to accept a COVID-19 vaccine. Nature Communications.
When does sharing information about others’ behaviors cause more of that same behavior? This is both a central question in the social sciences and also important for effecting preventative health behaviors, including vaccination. We use a randomized experiment embedded in the international survey on COVID-19 we conducted with Meta and JHU to address this, providing evidence that these descriptive norms increase intentions to get vaccinated.

Bias and high-dimensional adjustment in observational studies of peer effects. JASA.
Are observational studies informative about social contagion? We use a massive randomized experiment in Facebook News Feed to identify peer effects in link sharing and compare these results to those using only observational data. The richest models are able to recover the experimental “gold standard” peer effect, at least for the most popular classes of behavior.

Estimating peer effects in networks with peer encouragement designs. PNAS.
We employ a novel experimental design to modulate how many likes and comments are received by 49 million Facebook users, allowing us to estimate network effects in adoption and use of communication technologies.