Ideas Made to Matter
Four marketing lessons from the sad fate of Crystal Pepsi
Are the wrong people buying your new product? How to avoid “harbingers of failure.”
Apr 20, 2016
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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.
Honors
Simester and Tucker win AMA award
Publications
Featured Publication
"Price Frictions and the Success of New Products."Aparicio, Diego and Duncan Simester. Marketing Science Vol. 41, No. 6 (2022): 1057–1073. Supplemental Materials.
"A Sample Size Calculation for Training and Certifying Targeting Policies."
Simester, Duncan, Artem Timoshenko, and Spyros I. Zoumpoulis. Management Science. Forthcoming.
"Household Portfolios and Retirement Saving over the Life Cycle."
Parker, Jonathan A., Antoinette Schoar, Allison Cole, and Duncan Simester. Journal of Finance. Forthcoming.
"Optimizing Scalable Targeted Marketing Policies with Constraints."
Lu, Haihao, Duncan Simester, and Yuting Zhu. Marketing Science. Forthcoming. SSRN.
"Canary Categories."
Anderson, Eric, Chaoqun Chen, Ayelet Israeli, and Duncan Simester. Journal of Marketing Research Vol. 61, No. 5 (2024): 872-890.
"How Retailers Became Ad Platforms."
Gabel, Sebastian, Duncan Simester, and Artem Timoshenko. Harvard Business Review, June 17, 2024.
Recent Insights
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Harvard Business Review
How retailers became ad platforms
"The retailer-manufacturer relationship is undergoing significant disruption, creating new sources of growth but also new challenges."
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MarketWatch
How your vote for Democrats or Republicans affects your stock market ret...
MIT Sloan research focused on the portfolio changes made by a large group of investors in the wake of the November 2016 election.
Executive Education
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Driving Strategic Innovation
This joint program with IMD helps business leaders successfully manage innovation from concept to commercialization. Drawing on a dynamic and integrative value chain framework created at MIT, participants learn how to build organizational relationships that facilitate knowledge transfer, both within the firm and across the value chain.
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