Dr. Peter Fader joins WOMMA Advisory Board
Wharton School of Business
Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor
Professor of Marketing
Professor Fader’s expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with a wide range of data sources from industries such as consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, and music (online and offline). Much of his research highlights the common behavioral patterns that exist across these and other seemingly different domains. Currently, he is focusing on demonstrating the usefulness of probability models for data-intensive managerial problems, as a contrast to data mining and other popular (but often inappropriate) techniques. He covers these methods in a rigorous new course, “Applied Probability Models in Marketing” (syllabus available below). Professor Fader believes that marketing should not be viewed as a “soft” discipline, and he frequently works with different companies and industry associations to improve managerial perspectives and practices in this regard. His work has been published in (and he serves on the editorial boards of) a number of leading journals in marketing, statistics, and the management sciences.
Research Areas
Using behavorial data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities across a wide range of industries such as consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, and music (online and offline). Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and the impact of digital downloading (and filesharing) on music purchasing/consumption habits.
Current Projects
Building a variety of predictive and explanatory models for electronic commerce (e.g., forecasting models for website usage and purchasing behavior), the music industry (e.g., understanding the role of pre-launch orders in generating album sales), and consumer packaged goods (e.g., models of new product trial and repeat purchasing patterns).
