Marketing Professor Receives Best Paper Award for 2023

The Society for Marketing Science has awarded the 2023 Frank M. Bass Dissertation Paper Award to Kathleen T. Li, an assistant professor of marketing at Texas McCombs.

One of the marketing field’s most prestigious honors, the award is given annually to the best paper derived from a Ph.D. thesis that has appeared in print in an INFORMS journal. The 2023 award is for papers published during that year.

In an article titled “Augmented Difference-in-Differences,” Li developed an innovative tool for understanding causal relationships in marketing, allowing researchers to solve previously unanswerable questions using quasi-experimental designs. Written with co-author Christophe Van den Bulte, the article was published in the journal Marketing Science.

The new statistical method measures the causal impact of a marketing intervention by combining the benefits of two commonly used statistical methods — synthetic control and difference-in-difference.

“When the difference-in-difference method is too restrictive, the augmented difference-in-difference method serves as a flexible solution,” Li says. “It is especially useful when there is a short time before the marketing intervention, a situation where the synthetic control method may not apply.”