The conference and tutorial will bring together leading practitioners and scholars in marketing that use Bayesian statistical methods. The intent of the meeting is fourfold:
1. To provide training to students and practitioners on both basic and new Bayesian techniques.
2. To discuss current problems faced by practitioners and data are available for solving these problems.
3. To discuss new marketing methods and models.
4. To expose researchers in marketing to new advances in Bayesian methods.
Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in the academic and practitioner communities because of the recent development of simulation based methods (Markov chain Monte Carlo) of estimation. These methods allow the use of models of consumer behavior that were previously too difficult to estimate. Bayesian methods offer a means of more fully understanding issues that are central to marketing by allowing researchers to build integrated models of behavior that can be estimated with limited amounts of data.
The forthcoming book Bayesian Statistics and Marketing, by Allenby, McCulloch and Rossi, provides a summary of the theory and application of Bayesian methods in marketing, and will be used as a basis for the tutorial. The book includes software in the R statistical language to implement commonly used models, and some of the more advanced models recently published in the marketing literature. Our hope is that by offering a forum for the exchange of ideas and problems, we can promote good statistical practice and stimulate new research that is relevant to the field of marketing.