Patrick Choi: Marketing and Machine Learning

THE NEW ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MARKETING ADOPTS A QUANTITATIVE APPROACH. HE HAS BEEN MONITORING SNOWSTORMS IN THE US TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE SUCCESS OF MOVIES IN THEATRES AND ON DVD

“I couldn't wait to work with scholars and researchers at Bocconi’s Institute for Data Science and Analytics”, Patrick Choi says. In September he joined the Department of Marketing coming from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In Milan, he teaches marketing, channel marketing, text analysis and social media analytics. His research interest lies at the intersection of Marketing, Bayesian Methods, and Machine Learning. He has recently used these tools to estimate the demand of services and products, such as movies, that are offered in multiple channels.
 
In the early 2000s, Patrick Choi studied Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “Programming allowed me to turn my ideas into realities”, he says. After his master’s degree, he worked as Research Programmer at the Robotics Institute of the University and as a Senior Business Analyst at the credit cards division of the Capital One bank. That’s where he was introduced to marketing. “The bank uses predictive analytics to improve marketing strategies. The data-driven and quantitative approach to marketing fascinated me and pushed me towards pursuing a PhD in Marketing at Carnegie Mellon. I became interested in combining machine learning and causal inference techniques to understand the effectiveness of marketing strategies”.
 
In recent times, Choi has turned his attention to products that are released in multiple channels. He asks himself if the consumption in one channel does affect the product demand in other channels. “You may think that having more consumers watching a movie in theaters decreases the sales of DVD and Blu-Ray discs. I found out that that there is a deeper story to that. Moviegoers spread the word and generate buzz and excitement that increase the DVD/Blu-Ray disc sales. Not to mention that the experience that these consumers have in theaters attracts some of them to buy the disc”. Analyzing how much the consumption in theaters affects the demand of DVD/Blu-Ray can be tricky, because a popular movie attracts both DVD/Blu-Ray buyers and cinema viewers – a spurious correlation that confounds the true effect of the interrelationship of the two channels. In Choi’s job market paper The Perfect Storm, co-authored with Peter Boatwright and Michael Smith, he uses snowstorms to analyze the effect of theatrical attendance on the demand for subsequently released DVD/Blu-Ray discs. “When a snowstorm hits a city during the theatrical opening weekend it affects the attendance, but it would not affect directly the demand for DVD/Blu-Ray that are released several months after the theatrical opening. So, snowstorms give us the chance to credibly measure the effect of the theatrical attendance on DVD/Blu-Ray sales”.

by Claudio Todesco