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Doctoral student comments:
Yogesh Joshi
Jeffrey Larson
I chose Wharton because it was the largest, most productive, most diverse and reputed department for research in marketing
--Yogesh Joshi
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Marketing is fundamentally concerned with the description and prediction of decision outcomes involving all aspects of the firm that relate to its customers, competitors, distributors, and business regulators. Interest in description and prediction, in turn, is associated with the improvement of marketing decision making.
Marketing is an interdisciplinary field that draws upon theory and methodology from a wide variety of sources, including psychology, sociology, mathematics, statistics, and economics. Recent developments in the field include new methods and theories for understanding buyers' perceptions and preferences, probabilistic choice models, models for allocating marketing resources, econometric analysis of large data bases, and micro-economic models for marketing strategy.
The Wharton School's Marketing Department has had a long tradition in the development of new research methodologies and the successful implementation of new decision models and techniques in the practice of marketing.
Members of the Department tend to be very active in cutting-edge research. Each of the seminars offered by the Department reflects a combination of technical expertise and field-level experience. Graduates of the program have received offers of faculty positions at leading business schools, including Cornell, Duke, University of Chicago, Northwestern, NYU, LBS, Columbia, Emory, Harvard, USC, and UCLA.
Selected faculty and graduate student research topics include: cognitive processes of consumers, consumer preference measurement, marketing decision support systems, design and adoption of new products, marketing and competitive strategy, and international marketing.
Program of Study
The Ph.D. program in marketing is based on a minimum of twenty graduate level courses divided among four sets - four basic courses, five marketing courses, two to three courses in a related field, and six to seven electives, as well as the dissertation. Of the twenty courses, a maximum of eight can consist of transfer courses for graduate work at other universities.
These courses assume that the student has a basic knowledge of various business areas, computer programming, calculus, and matrix algebra.
Objectives
The program's specific objectives are:
- To provide an interdisciplinary environment for the generation of creative ideas in marketing;
- To provide sufficient analytic skills for evaluation (and implementation) of these ideas, i.e., critical insight;
- To provide training in the communication of these ideas to others; and
- To encourage a type of cumulative contribution to the marketing field by a process of learning how to learn, i.e., the strategy of scholarly inquiry.
We implement these objectives by means of a varied program of seminars, joint research projects, and colloquia.
Student Involvement with the Department
In addition to the regular seminars, all Ph.D. students are expected to participate actively in the Department's colloquium, which features presentation of research in progress by department faculty members, Ph.D. students, other schools, and guests.
Basic Courses
Several courses are instrumental in preparing the student for the preliminary examinations. In particular, previous students generally took the following courses to prepare for the exam: economics (680 or 701 and 682), decision processes (900), marketing (963, 964, 966, 967, 968), and statistics (510 or 550 and 511 or 551).
Major Field Requirements
The Marketing Department offers five Ph.D. seminars. These seminars cover those areas of marketing in which all Ph.D. marketing student should have basic competence, not only to understand the contemporary literature, but to contribute to the future of the discipline. All marketing students must takes these seminars.
The seminars involve in-depth consideration of various aspects of marketing. Ordinarily, a student taking these seminars will have already completed some work in quantitative methods and, perhaps, in behavioral sciences as well. The general objectives of these seminars are to: (1) discuss contemporary research problems and relevant literature, and (2) describe concepts and techniques for handling the research questions, current and future, in each field.
- MKTG 963 Consumer Behavior
- MKTG 964 Mathematical Models in Marketing Decision Making
- MKTG 966 Measurement and Data Analysis in Marketing
- MKTG 967 Research Methods in Marketing
- MKTG 968 Advanced Topics in Marketing Research
Note: Current syllabi (PDF format) for courses are available only to Wharton users through SPIKE.
Related Fields
Students also complete two to three course units of work in a related field. A partial list of possible related fields includes:
- Communications Research
- Decision Processes
- Econometrics
- Economics
- Information Systems
- Operations Research
- Psychology
- Sociology
- Statistics
Admission to Candidacy
Before admission to candidacy, the student is required to
- Complete the course requirements as described above.
- Take and pass the Marketing preliminary examination.
- Complete a faculty-supervised research paper by the middle of the second year of study.
Sample Program Sequence
Year 1, Fall
MKTG 967, MKTG 963, STAT 510 or 551, ECON 681 or 701
Year 1, Spring
MKTG 964, MKTG 966, STAT 511 or 551, ECON 682
Year 1, Summer
Marketing Preliminary Exam
Year 2, Fall
Electives, Research Paper
Year 2, Spring
Electives, Research
Year 3, Fall and Spring
Electives, Dissertation proposal defense
Year 4, Fall and Spring
Electives, Final dissertation defense
SpecialRequirements
Degree candidates must take four basic courses and five marketing core courses (one being the Advanced Topics course). Students are also required to complete a research paper, and to pass preliminary examination in marketing.
Current Faculty and Student Research
An array of research topics have covered areas such as cognitive processes of consumers, consumer preference measurement, marketing decision support systems, design and adoption of new products, marketing and competitive strategy, and international marketing.
Recent projects in the department include: the effects of incentives and goals on the acquisition of expertise in high-motivation environments; the effects of delayed service in the evaluation of medical experiences; improving indicators for consumer response to home video sales; understanding how consumers react to price shocks; the perceived value of human effort on the quality of goods; and models for compensation between vendors on the Internet.
The Wharton Doctoral Programs are part of the Graduate Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and as such they operate within the general framework of degree requirements and financial regulations stated in detail in the University's graduate academic bulletins, available from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Admissions Office, 16 College Hall, phone (215) 898-7444.
For Further Information:
Graduate School Coordinator
Managerial Sciences and Applied Economics
The Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
1150 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6302
Phone (215) 898-4877.
Further information is also available on the Wharton Doctoral Programs website.
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