Nonparametric Discrete Choice Experiments with Machine Learning Guided Adaptive Design

Designing products to meet consumers' preferences is essential for a business's success. We propose the Gradient-based Survey (GBS), a discrete choice experiment for multiattribute product design. The experiment elicits consumer preferences through a sequence of paired comparisons for partial profiles. GBS adaptively constructs paired comparison questions based on the respondents' previous choices. Unlike the traditional random utility maximization paradigm, GBS is robust to model misspecification by not requiring a parametric utility model. Cross-pollinating the machine learning and experiment design, GBS is scalable to products with hundreds of attributes and can design personalized products for heterogeneous consumers. We demonstrate the advantage of GBS in accuracy and sample efficiency compared to the existing parametric and nonparametric methods in simulations

Editorial: Defining interesting research problems

We argue that research problems are only interesting relative to some external audience. Interesting academic research should impact,at least,that external audience. Hence, we should target our research toward specific external audiences. Several foreboding trends that exacerbate the urgency of this targeting are discussed. To facilitate the targeting task,a partial list of fifteen possible audiences for academic research in marketing is identified. We discuss some of them,including practitioners,in detail. For example,we conclude that,for our research to be interesting to practitioners,practitioners must have the ability to improve and to make better decisions with enhanced understanding. Finally,we strongly suggest that we focus our research on fundamental problems in marketing. These are problems with the property that external audiences would first look to the marketing literature for answers

Editorial: Marketing Science, Models, Monopoly Models, and Why We Need Them

No abstract available

—Antibusiness Movies and Folk Marketing

We observe a disproportional number of movies that vividly portray business and businesspeople with an unfavorable bias, often depicting ordinary business activity as zero-sum and sometimes depicting it as callous, immoral, and criminal. These movies also often aggrevate existing economic misconceptions that might include what we could call folk marketing. Folk marketing includes false ideas, such as marketing being a zero-sum game (rather than adding value), marketing research being intrusive clandestine surveillance (rather than advocating the buy viewpoint), and secrecy about market data being evidence of nefarious activities (rather than simply hiding strategies from competitors). Marketing scholars need to combat vigorously these false ideas. Moreover, when advertisements sponsor movies, it might be necessary to consider the conjoined movie content and the consistency of that content with the desired brand image.antibusiness movies, motion pictures, films, motion picture industry, bias, villains, perceptions of businesspeople