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Four marketing lessons from the sad fate of Crystal Pepsi
Are the wrong people buying your new product? How to avoid “harbingers of failure.”
Faculty
Duncan Simester
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Duncan Simester is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he holds the NTU Chair in Management Science. He is an expert on how economics and artificial intelligence can contribute to the understanding and practice of marketing and strategy. His work is widely published in the academic literature. The studies rely heavily on industry participation, and often include large-scale field experiments conducted with cooperating firms. Simester regularly consults with a variety of organizations on topics related to marketing strategy, go-to-market strategies, and the use of artificial intelligence and experiments to improve business decisions.
Prior to joining the faculty at MIT, Duncan was a professor at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. He is also a qualified lawyer and member of the bar in his native New Zealand.
Duncan holds a PhD from MIT.
Publications
Featured Publication
"Harbingers of Failure."
Anderson, Eric, Song Lin, Duncan Simester and Catherine Tucker. Journal of Marketing Research Vol. 52, No. 5 (2015): 580-592. Appendix.
Featured Publication
"Informational Rigidities and the Stickiness of Temporary Sales."
Anderson, Eric, Benjamin A. Malin, Emi Nakamura, Duncan Simester, and Jón Steinsson. Journal of Monetary Economics Vol. 90, No. 1 (2017): 64-83.
"Efficiently Evaluating Targeting Policies: Improving Upon Champion vs. Challenger Experiments."
Simester, Duncan, Artem Timoshenko, and Spyros Zoumpoulis. Management Science. Forthcoming.
"Targeting Prospective Customers: Robustness of Machine Learning Methods to Typical Data Challenges."
Simester, Duncan, Artem Timoshenko, and Spyros I. Zoumpoulis. Management Science. Forthcoming.
"Belief Disagreement and Portfolio Choice."
Meeuwis, Maarten, Jonathan A. Parker, Antoinette Schoar, and Duncan I. Simester, MIT Sloan Working Paper 5553-18. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, September 2018.
"Field Experiments in Marketing (Volume 1)."
Simester, Duncan. In Handbook of Economic Field Experiments, edited by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, 465-497. Holland, Netherlands: Elsevier, 2017.