Ron Berman

Professor Berman specializes in quantitative marketing and digital markets. Drawing on economics and computer science, he combines theory with experimental design and causal inference to evaluate how firms’ pricing and advertising decisions affect consumer behavior and market outcomes, and how consumer data are used and valued. His research spans search and advertising markets, attribution, and algorithmic pricing and collusion, examining how platforms and algorithms influence firms’ pricing, targeting, and competition. He has designed and analyzed field experiments, from commercial A/B tests to large-scale nudge studies, and has published research on correcting false discovery in A/B testing. In settings without natural control groups, he has constructed synthetic benchmarks to estimate the causal impact of online retailers’ adoption of descriptive analytics. Professor Berman has consulted to startup companies and held technical advisory roles with the Mobile Marketing Association, the Advertising Research Foundation Attribution Workgroup, and the Marketing Science Institute Marketing Mix Modeling Task Force. His work appears in Games and Economic Behavior, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, Marketing Science, Management Science, and the Journal of Marketing Research. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Quantitative Marketing and Economics and serves on the editorial board of Marketing Science. His honors include Wharton teaching excellence awards, the Marketing Science Institute Scholar Award, two John D.C. Little Best Paper Award finalist selections, and the V. “Seenu” Srinivasan Young Scholar Award in Quantitative Marketing. Previously, Professor Berman was a principal and venture capital associate at Viola Ventures.