In August, MSI announced winners and honorable mention recipients in the 2021 Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition:

WINNERS

Madhav Kumar, MIT Sloan School of Management
Advisor(s): Dean Eckles; Sinan Aral
Scalable bundling via dense product embeddings

Hortense Fong, Yale University
Advisor(s): K Sudhir; Vineet Kumar
A Theory-Based Interpretable Deep Learning Architecture for Music Emotion

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Samuel (Sam) Goldberg, Northwestern University
Advisor(s): Brett Gordon
Designing Monitoring Programs

Jen Park, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Advisor(s): Itamar Simonson
Increasing Consumer Commitment after Product Evaluation: The Role of Explicit Rejection

Jung Youn Lee, Northwestern University
Advisor(s): Eric T. Anderson
Buying and Payment Habits: Using Grocery Data to Predict Credit Card Payments

“The competition encourages scholars early in their careers to focus on research that not only contributes to theory but that is also relevant and applicable to marketing managers,” said Executive Director John Lynch. “This year, our winners Hortense Fong and Madhav Kumar combined state-of-the-art machine learning methods to provide meaningful insights to highly relevant marketing problems.” About Hortense Fong’s paper, a reviewer said “This is one of the most important papers that I have seen in the intersection of marketing and machine learning. It tackles a very important aspect of marketing — emotions, advances state of the art methods in machine learning and makes them interpretable, rather than the typical black box approach that has been largely employed.”  About Madhav Kumar’s paper, a reviewer said, “I think this is a fantastic, relevant, methodologically sophisticated work that will ultimately make a timely and applicable contribution to the literature. It takes an old topic — bundling — and applies it at scale, with new ways of measuring complements and substitutes and proven gains at a retailer.”  MSI is proud to support these young scholars and share their research findings with the business community.

As winners, Madhav Kumar and Hortense Fong will receive $3,000 each. In addition, winners are invited to attend the MSI 2022 Summit, where their work will be acknowledged.