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INTEREST CATEGORY: MARKETING RESEARCH, DOCTORAL STUDENTS
POSTING TYPE: Revisits

Posted by: Lori Nicolini

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ISBM PhD Seminar Series (IPSS) Course Spring 2025 Registration Deadline February 22, 2025

ISBM will offer one course this Spring semester. Professor Vivek Astvansh, Associate Professor of Quantitative Marketing Analytics at McGill University, Canada and Indiana University, USA, will teach the course Establishing Causality:  A Multi-Method Approach.  This course is a doctoral seminar offered online.  ISBM will offer scholarships to cover 80% of the tuition fee for qualified students enrolled in a doctoral program; a recommendation letter is required to be eligible to receive the scholarship.

Publishing correlational evidence is becoming increasingly difficult. Using an instrument to control/correct for endogeneity is often fraught with the difficulty of convincing others that the instrument meets exclusion restriction. Peer-based instruments seem to have lived their life! Ah, the life of an empiricist seems to be getting harder!

This course acknowledges the challenges and informs you of various methods you can use to convince reviewers/referees and editors that your observed beta is causal. We will begin with experiments, so you are set up on the gold standard for causality. Next, we will discuss various methods that take you away from correlational evidence and toward its causal counterpart. Specifically, we will study instrumental variables and their use in regressions, instrument-free methods (e.g., Copula, heteroskedasticity-based methods), nonrandom shocks that require various matching methods and DiD, and random shocks. This course will introduce you to several databases that can help you answer firm-level questions, in general, and B2B/B2G questions, specifically. We will also talk about data from primary survey, secondary survey (think of YouGov), and interviews. Last, I will cull random shocks in the United States and China that academics in accounting, finance, and management disciplines have used and I will teach how these shocks can help answer marketing questions, focuses on marketing strategy formulation. Marketing strategy is a broad term with many meanings, and while scope and domain issues for the field continue to be debated, at a fundamental level has to do with how marketing concepts, tools, and processes can be used to help an organization develop a sustainable competitive advantage through the creation of superior customer value. While marketing strategy is a comparatively young field of study, substantive and sustained contributions by many of the discipline’s leading scholars over the last 30 years have helped create a rich and diverse literature base.

There will be eight (8) sessions of 120 minutes each. The seminar will be held on Fridays from 9:00AM – 11:00AM ET, beginning on March 7, 2025.

For complete course details and to register visit

Any questions regarding submissions can be emailed to Program Manager, Lori Nicolini LNicolini@psu.edu.