Harikesh Nair

Research Statement

Harikesh Nair is interested in marketing analytics and computational social science. His research brings together social science theory, statistical tools and Marketing data to better understand consumer behavior and to improve the strategic marketing decisions of firms. This work speaks to the challenges and opportunities firms face as they transition to a world where Marketing becomes a data-oriented, algorithmically-driven business function.

Research Interests

• Marketing analytics, workplace analytics, dynamic decision contexts, network effects, social interactions, empirical industrial organization, pricing, advertising, empirical agency, technology markets

Harikesh Nair is the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Marketing at Stanford GSB. His research is in marketing analytics and computational social science. His research brings together social science theory, statistical tools and Marketing data to better understand consumer behavior and to improve the strategic marketing decisions of firms. This work speaks to the challenges and opportunities firms face as they transition to a world where Marketing becomes a data-oriented, algorithmically-driven business function.

His recent research covers pricing, workplace analytics, quantitative incentive design, social media and social interactions, advertising, network effects, diffusion of technologies and empirical industrial organization, especially in contexts in which marketing activities have dynamic implications for the behavior of consumers and firms.

His research has been published in leading marketing journals such as “Journal of Marketing Research”, “Management Science”, “Marketing Science”, and “Quantitative Marketing and Economics”, and written up in popular-press outlets like “CNBC”, “The Economist”, “Financial Times”, “US News” and the “Wall St. Journal”. This research has been recognized with awards from the Quantitative Marketing & Economics Journal, the American Marketing Association Foundation, the Swiss Academy of Marketing Science, and the U.S. Council for University Transportation Centers.

Prof. Nair received his PhD in Business from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. Prior to that, he received his MS in Transportation Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.Tech in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Madras, India. He has been at Stanford since 2005, and teaches classes on Data and Decisions, Pricing and Monetization in the Stanford MBA program; on empirical analysis of dynamic decision contexts in the GSB PhD program; and on Marketing and Pricing in the GSB executive education and custom education programs. Prof. Nair serves as an area editor at Operations Research and associate editor at Management Science and Quantitative Marketing and Economics.

At the GSB, Nair was the Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar from 2007-2008, the Spence Faculty Scholar from 2011-12 and the Louise and Claude Rosenberg Faculty Scholar from 2009-2010 and 2012-13. In 2014, “Poets&Quants,” a magazine focused on Business schools, voted him one of the “40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 in the World”.

Academic Degrees

• PhD in Business, University of Chicago, 2005
• MS Transportation Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, 2000
• BTech Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, 1998

Academic Appointments

• At Stanford University since 2005

Awards and Honors

• PhD Faculty Distinguished Service Award, Stanford GSB, 2016
• Dick Wittink Best Article Award, QME Journal, 2008 and 2012
• John A. Howard AMA Doctoral Dissertation Award, American Marketing Association Foundation, 2006
• Sanford J. Grossman Fellowship in honor of Arnold Zellner, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 2004-05