Tuck professors win top marketing award
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - June 21, 2006
CONTACT: Kim Keating - 603-646-2733
HANOVER, N.H.—Tuck School of Business Professors Kusum Ailawadi, Praveen Kopalle, and Scott Neslin have received the prestigious John D. C. Little Award for their Marketing Science article titled "Predicting Competitive Response to a Major Policy Change: Combining Game Theoretic and Empirical Analyses." The award is the highest honor of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences' (INFORMS) Society for Marketing Science.
"To have three professors from one school collaborate and win a coveted award like this is a real honor," says Dean Paul Danos. "Professors Ailawadi, Kopalle, and Neslin should be proud of their accomplishment."
The article details research in which the authors determine that a combination of game theory and empirical analysis can be successfully used to predict how a firm's competitors and retailers will react in the face of a major policy change (such as a significant price cut).
"Game-theoretic models have been extensively used to prescribe optimal competitive response," reads the article. "A natural next step is to consider whether game theory combined with empirical analysis can actually predict this response..."
The team of Tuck professors tested this predictive power using data from Procter & Gamble's early-nineties "value pricing initiative," in which the company made major cuts in promotions and provided everyday lower prices to retailers and consumers. The research compared predictions based on their proposed method with actual data showing how competitors and retailers responded, concluding that "the prescriptions of a dynamic game-theoretic model contribute significantly to the prediction of actual competitor and retailer response to a major policy change."
The John D. C. Little Award is given annually to the best marketing paper published in either Marketing Science or Management Science the previous year. This year's award was announced at the groups' annual meeting earlier this month at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to 1988 the award was simply known as the "Best Paper" award.
Kusum Ailawadi is the Charles Jordan 1911 TU'12 Professor of Marketing at Tuck and has been at the school since 1993. Prior to joining Tuck, she was on the faculty at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia and at Boston College. Praveen Kopalle is associate professor of business administration at Tuck and has been at the school since 1996. Prior to joining Tuck, he was a faculty member at the University of Arizona. Scott Neslin is the Albert Wesley Frey Professor of Marketing at Tuck and has been at the school since 1978. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT, Yale, and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke. All three professors teach regular courses in Tuck's MBA program.
Founded in 1900, Tuck is the first graduate school of management and consistently ranks among the top business schools worldwide.
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