As part of WU Vienna’s Department of Marketing, the Service Marketing group wishes to strengthen its’ junior research staff by attracting colleagues with a solid academic qualification in the field of quantitative research methods. The ideal candidate for a PhD position at the Institute has a master’s degree or equivalent in statistics, mathematics, computer science or econometrics. A working knowledge in quantitative marketing and/or economics are an advantage but not required.

We cultivate a strong empirical research tradition and typically employ advanced statistical methods to provide decision support for issues of managerial relevance. In our research projects we work in interdisciplinary teams and aim to develop, adopt, and empirically test the performance of newly emerging analytical, computationally intense methodology and/or modeling approaches to marketing problems. Examples of current research projects include (more information can be found here: www.wu.ac.at/sm):

• Mixture models for count data with unobserved heterogeneity to study dynamics of customer-firm-interactions (with applications in customer relationship and loyalty management)

• Bayesian statistics, MCMC techniques, and INLA to develop quantitative marketing models (with applications to study customer cohort specific diffusion processes and integrating spatial customer data in multi-category choice models)

• Textmining methods using dynamic Latent Dirichlet Allocation techniques (with applications in analyzing User Generated Content derived from customers’ online product reviews)

• Clustering of high-dimensional data, association rule mining, multivariate probit models, machine learning like gradient boosting trees (with applications in shopping basket analysis, customer relationship management and target marketing)

In terms of dissemination of our findings, we aim to publish our research in highly respected quantitative marketing and management journals like Marketing Science, Management Science, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, or Journal of Marketing Research.

If you are interested in joining our team please contact us via service.marketing@wu.ac.at. (informal requests can also be directed to the head of the Service Marketing group, Prof. Thomas Reutterer: reutterer@wu.ac.at ), or visit the following page, where vacancies at the Institute for Service Marketing and Tourism are formally advertised:  http://www.wu.ac.at/jobs/en