Jorge M. Silva-Risso
Introduction
Jorge M. Silva-Risso of the UC Riverside School of Business passed away on 26 Sep 2021
POSTING TYPE: Obituaries
Author: S. Bala Balachander
It is with great sadness that we announce the passing on September 26, 2021 of our friend and colleague Professor of Marketing Jorge M. Silva-Risso of the UC Riverside School of Business.
Jorge Silva-Risso joined the UCR School of Business faculty in 2003 as an Assistant Professor of Marketing and taught there for fifteen years before his retirement as a tenured full Professor of Marketing in 2018. Prior to joining UCR he was executive director of marketing science at J.D. Power & Associates and a visiting assistant professor of marketing at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Silva-Risso joined J.D. Power in 1996, and started the Marketing Science group, which specialized in developing and implementing quantitative models of consumer-level response to marketing programs offered by the automobile industry. Those models were used by more than 80% of the firms in the US automobile industry to plan and optimize their pricing, promotion, and advertising programs.
Professor Silva-Risso’s research interests were econometric models of consumer response, marketing effectiveness, pricing, and the effects of the Internet on marketing. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of Marketing, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, Interfaces, and the Journal of Product and Brand Management. His consulting practice focused on utilizing quantitative tools and models to help automobile manufacturers increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their pricing, promotion, and advertising programs. He also worked on models to assist the product planning process. Silva-Risso’s modeling work for the automobile industry was awarded the 2006 Practice Prize by the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and was a finalist for the 2007 INFORMS Edelman award. He also won the 2007 Paul E. Green best paper award from the Journal of Marketing Research.
Professor Silva-Risso studied business administration (with a focus on quantitative methods) in his native Uruguay and began his career serving on the faculty of the School of Business and Economics at Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay), where he taught in the areas of finance, operations research, statistics, and organizational economics, and served as academic assistant to the dean. He also held several management and consulting positions in multinational and Uruguayan firms.
In 1989 he accepted an offer from the Fulbright Commission to go to UCLA as a Fulbright Scholar, where he earned an MBA (1991, Carter Fellow, Beta Gamma Sigma) and a Ph.D. in management (1996). His doctoral dissertation on the optimization of promotional calendars received the prestigious Clayton Award from the Marketing Science Institute. Professor Silva-Risso served on the advisory board of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Society of Marketing Science (ISMS) from 2002 to 2007, and was the vice president of practice of ISMS from 2006 to 2007.
In addition to the many accolades Professor Silva-Risso earned during his distinguished career, he is best remembered by his business school colleagues as a scholar, gentleman, and a positive force within the faculty. He will be missed by all.