Workshop helps PhDs wrestle with Big Data

Olin BlogOlin Blog

The Quantitative Marketing and Structural Econometrics Workshop hosted this month at Washington University attracted 153 PhD students and faculty from across the country who create complex models to dice and slice big data sets for research in the areas of marketing, economics, and operations.
The workshop’s goal is to prepare PhD students for the rigors of research in the academic job market, according to Olin’s Raphael Thomadsen, associate professor of marketing and co-organizer of the gathering.
“We saw many students going into the job market with supposed ‘structural’ papers which were not meaningfully structural at all,” said Thomadsen who created the workshop in 2010 with Brett Gordon, a professor at Kellogg School of Management.
“Rather, these papers had very complex models that were often not identified by the data. Further, many people ran structural models without understanding what benefits a structural model might bring.”
Zhenling Jiang, a PhD student at Olin, attended the workshop for a second time this July. She is preparing to go on the marketing job market in Summer 2018. According to Jiang, “It was hugely helpful for my PhD study. The workshop brings thought leaders in the field to share their experience and state-of-the-art techniques to students. Each topic is taught by someone who is highly experienced in the area.”
The workshop is intended for PhD students in marketing, economics, or related business disciplines who have completed at least two courses on microeconomics and econometrics. So, as you would imagine, I needed her help translating the subject for this post.
Basics of Structural and Non‐Structural Analysis
Thomadsen kicked off the workshop with the basics, as depicted in this chart:

Descriptive statistical analysis I understood, but models were new to me.
So I asked Jiang to explain: “Theory-based models draw on analysis of theories about how agents behave. The model could come from economic theory or psychology ...

Read More