My research focuses on how firms can use individual longitudinal choice data to increase engagement, usage, and spending in experiential categories. The importance of experiential consumption among the consumer base is growing, along with its economic significance: 74% of Americans claim to prioritize experiences over ownership of material goods, and they spend billions of dollars in these categories, e.g., over $55B on sports events alone in the U.S. in 2017. My current projects span two broad experiential domains: live events (art performances and professional sports) and charitable donation. In close collaboration with industry partners, I study how to leverage past trajectories of consumer choices to optimize marketing activities, including product recommendation, price and inventory management, and donation solicitation. In these projects, I use both observational and field experiment data, and a range of estimation methodologies, primarily hierarchical and nonparametric Bayesian, and increasingly tools from machine learning.
