Yale SOM Faculty Receive Top Award at Marketing Science Conference

Yale SOM marketing professors Jiwoong Shin and Dina Mayzlin were honored for their research at the 34th annual INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, held from June 7 to 9 in Boston.

Shin and Mayzlin, both associate professors of marketing, won the John D. C. Little Award for their 2011 paper "Uninformative Advertising as an Invitation to Search." The Little Award is given annually to the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science or Management Science.

In their paper, Mayzlin and Shin note that some 60% of television advertising provides no information on product attributes, instead focusing on images or music. The paper explores the reasons that advertisers would use limited space and dollars for these "uninformative" advertisements.

Using a game theory model, Mayzlin and Shin show that when advertising a high-quality product, specifying product attributes can be counterproductive, because a firm can describe only a limited number of those attributes. An uninformative advertisement, on the other hand, can prompt viewers to seek out additional information on the product, and in the process learn about more of its positive attributes.

Last year Shin and Yale SOM marketing professor K. Sudhir, the James L. Frank '32 Professor of Private Enterprise and Management and director of the China India Consumer Insights Program, won the John D. C. Little Award for their 2010 paper "A Customer Management Dilemma: When Is It Profitable to Reward One's Own Customers?"

Mayzlin won the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award for her 2010 paper "Using Online Conversations to Study Word-of-Mouth Communication." The paper was a collaboration with David Godes, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland.