BIO

Eva Ascarza is the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Marketing Unit. She teaches the Marketing core in the MBA required curriculum and an elective course titled Managing Customers for Growth.

As a marketing modeler, Professor Ascarza uses tools from statistics, economics, and machine learning to answer relevant marketing questions. Her main research areas are customer management (with special attention to the problem of customer retention), Marketing AI, and algorithmic decision making. She uses field experimentation (e.g., A/B testing) as well as econometric modeling and machine learning tools not only to understand and predict patterns of behavior, but also to optimize the impact of firms’ interventions. Her research has appeared in leading marketing journals including Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research. She received the 2014 Frank Bass award, awarded to the best marketing paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis published in an INFORMS-sponsored journal. Her research has been recognized as a Paul E. Green Award finalist (2016 and 2017) and winner (2018), awarded to the best article in the Journal of Marketing Research that demonstrates the greatest potential to contribute significantly to the practice of marketing research. Her research was selected as a Weitz-Winer-O’Dell finalist in 2021, awarded to research that has made the most significant long-term contribution to marketing theory, methodology, and/or practice. She was named a Marketing Science Institute (MSI) Young Scholar in 2017, received the Erin Anderson Award for an Emerging Female Marketing Scholar and Mentor in 2019, and was named MSI Scholar in 2020. She serves on the editorial review board of several top marketing journals including Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and Quantitative Marketing and Economics.

Professor Ascarza earned a Ph.D. in marketing from London Business School, a B.S. in mathematics at the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), and a M.S. in economics and finance from Universidad de Navarra (Spain). Prior to joining HBS, she was an associate professor in the marketing department at Columbia Business School.