PUBLICATIONS

The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing Strategy

Sibel Sozuer,  Gregory S. Carpenter, Praveen K. Kopalle, Leigh M. McAlister and Donald R. Lehmann 

Marketing Letters, 2020. [Paper]

This article provides a high-level overview of marketing strategy research and offers a number of suggestions of areas ripe for future research. We discuss the most fundamental concepts that continue to drive current marketing strategy research and examine how these concepts have shaped marketing strategy and the role of the marketing function. In addition, we highlight the developments in marketing accountability, marketing’s influence within the firm, and alternatives to a market-driven approach in generating sustainable competitive advantage. Finally, we identify directions for future research in the light of recent developments, availability of new data, and emerging issues.

WORKING PAPERS

A Recipe for Creating Recipes: An Ingredient Embedding Approach 

Sibel Sozuer, Oded Netzer and Kriste Krstovski (Job Market Paper) [Paper]

• Shankar-Spiegel Dissertation Proposal Award, Marketing EDGE, 2020
• ISMS Early Stage Research Grant, INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, 2020

An idea is a collection of existing concepts or words. What makes an idea original or appealing is how these elements are combined in the context in which they appear. Similarly, a food recipe is a combination of ingredients, and it is often evaluated based on how these ingredients fit together to form the whole. This research leverages representation learning methods, specifically word embeddings, to measure the fit among ingredients in the recipe and capture the possibly complex interactions between these ingredients. Using a large-scale online recipe dataset with over 57K recipes, the authors investigate how the fit between the ingredients relates to recipe popularity (trial) and favorability (ratings). Counter to prior research on creativity, which primarily suggests that creativity is mostly associated with positive outcomes, the study finds that recipes with unique ingredients have lower trials, but higher ratings given trial. In contrast, high fit among ingredients promotes both trial and ratings. The paper also extends the proposed approach to an ideation dataset for a new health app. Based on these findings, the authors develop a generative recipe tool that suggests recipe improvements by adding, removing, or substituting ingredients (http://recipecreativity.com/) and demonstrate its practical value using online panel experiments.

The Newsvendor Problem with Multiple Inputs Under a Carbon Emission Constraint

Sibel Sozuer, Ulku Gurler and Emre Berk

In this research, we study the impact of carbon emission regulations on production as well as firm and customer welfare in a newsvendor setting. We extend the classical newsvendor setting to consider the multi- input production decision of a manufacturer that produces a single product by transforming multiple substitutable inputs via alternative production functions under carbon emission regulations. These regulations are incorporated into our study through a penalty function that models taxation, strict carbon caps or cap-and-trade settings. The optimal production policy involves the optimal choice of the input mix and the production quantity that maximize the expected profit of the manufacturer. We also complement our theoretical findings with a real-life agricultural production example. We find that distinct attributes of the inputs and the optimal choice of their mixture to produce a unit quantity become particularly important when emission constraints are imposed by exogenous bodies. We find that the manufacturer copes with carbon emission regulations by switching to low emitting inputs without significant reductions in service levels up to a certain level of target emission reduction. For more ambitious target carbon emission restrictions, manufacturer decreases the service level to reduce carbon emissions even further, which surprisingly may lead to an increase in unit carbon footprint per output.

RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

Embedding-based Diet Specific Food Recommendation, with Oded Netzer and J. Jeffrey Inman

Asymmetries in Cultural Diffusion, with Olivier Toubia