Ph.D. in Business - Marketing

The doctoral program at the business school at Rice University is designed to provide students with the training necessary for a successful research and teaching career. This training revolves around attaining expertise in the foundational areas and using this as a basis to address important marketing issues. The training components involve selecting courses to meet individual needs and interests, working closely with faculty members on joint research, and conducting original research projects which ultimately lead to a dissertation that advances the field. Marketing is naturally interdisciplinary in nature and therefore draws theory and methodology widely from a variety of fields, including economics, statistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology and neurosciences. Research in marketing encompasses three broad overlapping areas: quantitative modeling, consumer behavior and strategy. The quantitative modeling area is rooted in microeconomics, econometrics, psychometrics, sociometrics, statistics and industrial organization. Some of the major objectives include creating models to probe competitive marketing strategies that explain and predict consumer choices and understand market structure. Examples of topics investigated by researchers at Rice include how to detect underlying trends using google data, how consumers allocate their time and discretionary income across competing products, services and activities, how product assortment impacts customer retention, why prices in the internet vary widely even though customers can easily search, and why digital piracy might not be bad for firms. Consumer behavior primarily focuses on explaining why consumers behave the way they do. Traditionally, psychology and sociology have been used to understand factors that explain consumer behavior. More recently, empirical modeling, survey methods, and neuroscience have provided important insights about consumers. Examples of the research conducted at the business school include why consumers purchase extended service contracts, how different identities (political, gender, moral) affect consumer decision making, studying lending decisions in peer-to-peer sites like Kickstarter and Kiva, developing strategies to encourage consumers to save more, why being on online communities fosters more risk taking, and why just surveying customers makes them more satisfied. The marketing strategy area deals with issues that focus on understanding and improving the strategy of the firm, and with strategic decision making of managers. Today, researchers in this area use a variety of tools including quantitative modeling, experiments, and surveys to answer questions related to a variety of topics. Topics researched at the business school include understanding the financial impact of marketing-mix decisions by managers, estimating customer-lifetime value and its impact on a firm’s financial performance, developing and measuring the impact of strategies that affect customers in terms of their satisfaction, brand-connection, brand equity, and commitment and measuring marketing outcomes such as brand-equity, customer satisfaction and corporate-social responsibility based on secondary data