Professor of Marketing
Below are course materials and short summaries of my current courses
Course materials: Innovation and CRM
Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller (2022), “On CUE: The Quest for Optimal Customer Unit Economics,” Harvard Business School Industry and Background Note (9-523-050).
Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller (2021), “Customer Lifetime Social Value (CLSV),” Harvard Business School Industry Note (N9-518-077), Teaching Note (5-521-081), and PowerPoint Supplement (5-217-16).
Bestseller, Harvard Business Publishing, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
The figure shows the retention of customers
acquired by a digital game from three different
channels: affiliate marketing
(via a paid link from another website),
e-mail, and search engine optimization
(or SEO, which refers to customers arriving
from organic search links). The graph
depicts the percent of customers from
each acquisition channel that are still active
on the app over time, monthly, as a percent
of the initial set of customers: in less than a year
after joining only 20% of the affiliate cohort is
still active, while about 40% of the email
and SEO cohorts are active.
Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller (2020), “Customer Management Dynamics and Cohort Analysis," Harvard Business School Industry Note (N9-520-122).
Elie Ofek, Eitan Muller and Barak Libai (2019), “Ride-Hailing Services: Forecasting Growth,” Harvard Business School Case (9-519-097), Teaching Note (5-520-123), and PowerPoint Supplement (5-520-714).
Elie Ofek, Eitan Muller and Barak Libai (2016), Innovation Equity: Assessing and managing the monetary value of new products and services, University of Chicago Press.
New Products and New Tech: An MBA elective
In classroom discussions, cases, and group deliberations, we address managing and valuing new products and new tech, with special attention given to the entertainment, media and technology business.
We ask whether Uber could have been so successful without breaking the law; wonder who will win the voice war of the digital assistants: Google, Alexa or Siri; and wonder about Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse. We compute the customer equity of firms such as SiriusXM satellite radio, and discuss the reasons leading Hyundai Motors to give up developing its own car entertainment system, adopting instead software solutions from Apple and Google.
We examine the notion of disruptive innovations such as the iPhone, Uber, and Airbnb, and ask the question: To whom exactly are they disruptive? We show evidence to demonstrate how disruptive, and to whom, are iPhone, Uber, and Airbnb. We demonstrate the power of social interactions in social networks, and why these interactions are responsible for the fact that growth of new products is a slow process, even for successful products such as wired earbuds.
In every session, we look at new tech such as smart homes, wearable devices, cloud kitchens, NFTs, and XaaS (everything as a service) and ask what are the obstacle to adoption of these innovations, who might be the early users, and what are the environmental/social effects of these technologies?
Course syllabus: Read here.
Quant Methods PhD seminar
This is a first year quantitative course aimed at both quant and behavioral students. The purpose of this doctoral seminar is to acquaint students with the key issues, basic research techniques, and key findings in quantitative models in marketing. Topics covered includes both empirical models and analytical models in marketing. For students who are interested in quantitative methods in marketing, this seminar will prepare them to come up with research ideas that will eventually lead to publishable papers and will supply the skills and tools to implement ideas. For students who are interested in other areas, this seminar will provide a broad survey and the basic understandings of the main research areas associated with quantitative methods in marketing. We debate about choosing a research topic and what quant publications are about. In terms of topics we discuss network externalities and seeding, social contagion, and monetization of mobile apps. while in terms of methods we discuss quasi-experiments; hazard/survival models; VAR modeling; and agent-based modeling.
Course syllabus: Read here.