Publications and working papers

Evaluating Novel Unstructured Treatments with Generative AI: A Causal Prediction Framework

Paul B. Ellickson, Wreetabrata Kar, James C. Reeder III, and Guang Zeng

Journal of Marketing Research

A framework for designing and evaluating new, unstructured marketing treatments before they are deployed, combining causal estimates from past campaigns with semantic embeddings and generative AI, and using distance in embedding space to judge when predictions can be trusted.

Estimating Marketing Component Effects: Double Machine Learning from Targeted Digital Promotions

Paul B. Ellickson, Wreetabrata Kar, and James C. Reeder III

Marketing Science, 42(4), 704–728 Mabry Best Paper Award

A double machine learning framework that recovers the causal effect of each component inside a compound marketing intervention, applied to 34 targeted email campaigns sent to 1.3 million customers, with overlap diagnostics and off-policy evaluation of improved targeting.

Disentangling the Effects of Ad Tone on Voter Turnout and Candidate Choice in Presidential Elections

Brett R. Gordon, Mitchell J. Lovett, Bowen Luo, and James C. Reeder III

Management Science, 69(1), 220–243

Separately identifies how positive and negative advertising affect whether people vote and whom they vote for in U.S. presidential elections.

The Dynamics of Retail Oligopoly

James C. Reeder III, Guang Zeng, Arie Beresteanu, Paul B. Ellickson, and Sanjog Misra

Under review, Management Science

Studies how Walmart's entry into grocery retailing changed competition and whether consumers benefited.

Can CRM Activity Logs Improve Sales Forecasting?

James C. Reeder III, Nawar N. Chaker, Johannes Habel, and Aldo Zucaro

Under review, Production and Operations Management

Asks whether the customer notes salespeople record in CRM systems improve forecasts of customer outcomes, and which employees' records carry the signal.

Dynamics of Pro-Social Adoption: Promotions, Polarity, and Vaccinations

Daniel Kebede and James C. Reeder III

Reject and resubmit, Journal of Marketing

Measures how COVID-19 vaccine incentive programs affected vaccination, and how timing, local polarization, risk, and income moderated their effect.

Local Political Preference and Digitization Effectiveness

Mohammad S. Rahman and James C. Reeder III

Reject and resubmit, Management Science

Tests whether regional political preferences shape how well digital transformation works in B2B selling.

Unobserved Heterogeneity and Confounding in Causal Forests

Candace Jens, T. Beau Page, and James C. Reeder III

In preparation for Management Science

Shows how researchers can account for unobserved group-level variables when estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with causal forests.

Heterogeneous Responses to Manufacturer Promotions in Gatekeeper Retail Channels

James C. Reeder III, Wreetabrata Kar, and Paul B. Ellickson

In preparation for Journal of Marketing Research

Examines how specialty retailers respond to manufacturer promotions, whether those promotions pay off, and how to target them better.

Quantifying the Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Selling Interactions

Murali K. Mantrala and James C. Reeder III

How seller exhaustion changes the buyer–seller interaction.

Addressing Heterogeneity in Priming: An LLM-Based Priming Evaluation Protocol

Ajmal Basheer, Ahreum Maeng, and James C. Reeder III

Uses large language models to identify which consumers a text prime actually reaches, sharpening treatment effect estimates.