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Special Issue of Marketing Science on Field Experiments

Submission deadline: August 31, 2017

The marketing literature has recently seen a surge of papers using field experiments. While this has been partly catalyzed by the relative ease of field experimentation in digital settings, field experiments are increasingly feasible even in non-digital settings.

From a scientific perspective, field experiments offer some advantages over other research methods. When designed well, they can help avoid concerns about endogeneity and selection, which often make it difficult to make causal inference with historical data. They can also aid in validation of theories in real world settings with fewer modeling assumptions. But field experiments also have limitations. Notably, it may be difficult to isolate the behavioral mechanisms underlying the findings, and it is generally difficult to answer counterfactuals that are not represented by one of the experimental conditions. In such cases, field experiments can be valuable complements to traditional lab experiments or model based analysis of historical data.

Marketing Science invites papers for a special issue that report findings from one or more field experiments. While not necessary, papers that combine field experiments with other methods such as laboratory experiments or structural models of historical data are also welcome. The goal of the special issue is to stimulate research using field experiments applied to address different types of research questions across a wide range of substantive areas.

Research questions of interest can include, but are not limited to:

1. Testing and Measuring Behavioral and Economic Effects in the field

• Field validation and testing of behavioral theories, comparison of effect sizes of behavioral (motivated by behavioral theories) and economic levers related to a managerially relevant outcome
• Causal identification and effect sizes of economic levers avoiding endogeneity and selection confounds.
• Combining behavioral experimentation with quantitative analyses

2. Field Experiments to Optimize Managerial Decision Making

Generating information to optimize pricing, product assortments, advertising, targeting and customer management tactics by measuring how desired outcomes respond to alternative levels of these levers, without dealing with the typical endogeneity issues in such measurement.

3. Design of Field Experiments for Optimal Information Generation in Managerial Decision Making

Adaptive and automated experimentation in real time, big data environments for pricing, advertising, assortments and targeting that balance the information gains from exploration of the strategy space against the cost of lost profits.

4. Field Experiments and Structural Models

Combining field experiments on behavioral or economic levers (where identifying variation is hard to come by with naturally occurring data) with structural modeling to perform counterfactual analysis.

5. Understudied Areas in Consumer Choice

• Consumer choice in areas such as sustainability, health, emerging markets, where small nudges and framing effects are shown to have significant impact
• Charitable giving
• Measurement of peer effects

6. Intra-and Inter-organizational Choice

Response to managerial levers in B2B markets, vertical firm relationships such as in marketing channels, sales force choices, and firm choices under competition.

The list is offered as a starting point to stimulate research ideas, and is by no means exhaustive. Marketing Science encourages and welcomes field experiment research that may not fall under these buckets.

Special Issue Editors

Editor-in-Chief: K. Sudhir

Senior Editors: Leif Nelson, Duncan Simester

Submission Deadline

The deadline for the special issue is August 31, 2017. Authors are encouraged to submit papers early and any time before the deadline for the special issue.

Submission Procedure

Please submit your manuscript online via ScholarOne Manuscript Central at

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When choosing Manuscript Type in Step 1 of the submission process, enter Special Issue – Field Experiments. . All papers will go through the standard Marketing Science review process i.e., the EIC will assign each submission to one of two SEs for the special issue or EIC, who will then manage the review process from that point.

For questions about the fit of a paper for the “Field Experiment” special issue, authors can send a one page abstract to the EIC at k.sudhir@yale.edu. The EIC will comment on the fit without making any judgments on the quality and the potential publication prospects, which will be judged entirely by the review process.

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