Duncan Simester

Duncan Simester investigates retail pricing and how customers form inferences about competitive prices from common marketing cues such as sale signs, price endings, installment billing offers, and credit card logos. Simester also investigates how operations research techniques can be used to optimize marketing decisions. His current work explores the long-term costs of stockouts, the long-term impact of promotion decisions, dynamic catalog mailing decisions, and adaptive techniques for the optimal design of pricing and product decisions. Other work investigates the allocation of ownership in channel relationships, and the adaptive design of market research instruments. His research is often inter-disciplinary in nature, using methodologies developed in economics or operations research to make contributions to the academic literature. The research relies heavily on industry participation, and includes many large-scale field tests conducted with a variety of direct marketing companies and other retail firms.