Spyros Zoumpoulis, Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences, INSEAD, to speak on Thursday, December 21, 2017 at 14:30


Lecture Title: Customizing Marketing Decisions Using Field Experiments

The event organized in cooperation with the course “Management Game” of ECE NTUA

Abstract: We investigate how firms can use the results of field experiments to optimize the targeting of promotions. We evaluate seven widely-used segmentation methods using a series of two large scale field experiments. The first field experiment is used to generate a common pool of training data for each of the seven methods. We then validate the seven optimized policies provided by each method together with uniform benchmark policies in a second field experiment. The findings reveal that model-driven methods (Lasso regression and Finite Mixture Models) performed the best. Some distance-driven methods also performed well (particularly k -Nearest Neighbors). However, the classification methods we tested performed relatively poorly. The recision of the data varied with the level of aggregation, and the model-driven methods made the best use of the information when it was more precise. The model-driven methods also performed best in parts of the parameter space that are well represented in the training data. The relative performance of the methods is robust to modest differences in the settings used to create the training and validation data. We explain the poor performance of the classification methods in our setting and describe how it could be improved.

Short CV: Spyros Zoumpoulis is an Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences at INSEAD. His research is on using analytics and machine learning to optimize marketing and operations decisions. His current focus is on investigating how to use data from field experiments to make optimal decisions, such as targeting decisions in marketing. More generally, he is broadly interested in problems at the interface of networks, learning with data, and decision making. His research has appeared in leading management academic journals such as Management Science and Operations Research.

Spyros Zoumpoulis has worked with companies including Microsoft, LinkedIn, IBM, Oracle, and Accenture and serves on the advisory board of start-ups in the areas of his expertise. At INSEAD, he teaches the MBA core course on uncertainty, data and judgment, the MBA electives on big data analytics and models for strategic planning, the MBA business foundations course on quantitative methods, the PhD courses on probability and statistics, and the INSEAD-Sorbonne business foundations course on uncertainty, data and judgment. He has won the Dean's Commendation for Excellence in MBA Teaching award and has been nominated for the best MBA elective professor award.

Spyros Zoumpoulis received the B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.