Stephan Seiler Marketing Professor Imperial College London
Associate Professor of Marketing
Associate Professor of Economics (by courtesy)
CEPR Research Fellow
CESifo Research Network Fellow
IFS Research Fellow
Imperial College Business School
South Kensington Campus
London SW7 2AZ
Email: Stephan.a.seiler@gmail.com
I use data to understand how consumers make choices in settings
ranging from laundry detergent discounts to choosing a hospital for
a bypass operation. I am particularly interested in how consumers gather
information before making a purchase and what we can learn from data on
consumer search behavior.
I am an Associate Editor at Marketing Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics,
and the Journal of Industrial Economics. I co-organize the European Quant Marketing Seminar (eQMS),
and I am a Public Editor at @QME_Journal.
Google Scholar profile
SSRN profile
LinkedIn profile
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SeilerStephan
Recent Research Highlights:
The Sequential Search Model: A Framework for Empirical Research
🚨🚨 Updated Version (Jan '23) 🚨🚨 --> Now with Accompanying Code !!!
The sequential search model (Weitzman, 1979) has emerged as the workhorse model for research based on consumer search data. Papers in this growing literature adopt different specifications of utility, estimate the model using a variety of approaches, and discuss identification in relation to a specific setting. Our aim in this paper (joint work with Elisabeth Honka and Raluca Ursu) is to provide a unified treatment of the aspects of the sequential model that are relevant to empirical work in order to consolidate knowledge and to provide a comprehensive introduction on the use of the sequential model, especially for researchers that are new to working with search data and models.
We also provide a comprehensive code base that covers different methods for computing reservation utilities and 4 different estimation approaches. Click here for access to the code.
State Dependence in Brand Choice
In a new paper with Julia Levine (forthcoming in Marketing Science) we analyze whether consumers that start purchasing new brands persist in their choices. We leverage stock-outs due to hurricanes that force to consumers to switch to a different brand because their preferred product is not available. Interestingly, we find that switches due to hurricane stock-outs do not exhibit any persistence and consumers switch back to their pre-hurricane purchases immediately. Therefore, we conclude that consumers do not exhibit structural state dependence in their brand choices. We rule out that our null result is driven by unusual purchases during a hurricane or context-specific purchase behavior when preparing for a hurricane. Our research is nicely summarized in this VoxEU article.
Find out more about my recent research projects on my Blog.
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