PUBLICATIONS

A Recipe for Creativity: An Ingredient Embedding Approach 

Sibel Sozuer, Oded Netzer and Kriste Krstovski [Paper]

• Shankar-Spiegel Dissertation Proposal Award, Marketing EDGE, 2020
• ISMS Early Stage Research Grant, INFORMS Society for Marketing Science, 2020

An idea is more than a simple collection of words or ingredients that make up the idea. What makes an idea original or appealing is how these elements are combined in the context in which they appear. This research leverages representation learning methods, specifically word embeddings, to measure internal coherence among the components of a creative idea and capture the relationship between its coherence and idea evaluation or success. Using a large-scale online recipe dataset with over 57,000 recipes, as well as an ideation dataset of 1,057 ideas, the authors investigate how the fit among idea components relates to downstream measures such as popularity and evaluation. The results consistently show that internal coherence of an idea promotes its popularity, trial, and posttrial evaluation. Counter to prior research on creativity, which suggests that creativity is mostly associated with positive outcomes, the study finds that ideas with unique ingredients have lower popularity or trial, but higher ratings given trial in the context of food recipes. Based on these findings, the authors develop a generative recipe tool that suggests recipe improvements by adding, removing, or substituting ingredients  (http://recipecreativity.com/).

The Past, Present, and Future of Marketing Strategy

Sibel Sozuer,  Gregory S. Carpenter, Praveen K. Kopalle, Leigh M. McAlister and Donald R. Lehmann 

Marketing Letters, 2020. [Paper]

This article provides a high-level overview of marketing strategy research and offers a number of suggestions of areas ripe for future research. We discuss the most fundamental concepts that continue to drive current marketing strategy research and examine how these concepts have shaped marketing strategy and the role of the marketing function. In addition, we highlight the developments in marketing accountability, marketing’s influence within the firm, and alternatives to a market-driven approach in generating sustainable competitive advantage. Finally, we identify directions for future research in the light of recent developments, availability of new data, and emerging issues.

WORKING PAPERS

The Newsvendor Problem with Multiple Inputs Under a Carbon Emission Constraint

Sibel Sozuer, Ulku Gurler and Emre Berk

In this research, we study the impact of carbon emission regulations on production as well as firm and customer welfare in a newsvendor setting. We extend the classical newsvendor setting to consider the multi- input production decision of a manufacturer that produces a single product by transforming multiple substitutable inputs via alternative production functions under carbon emission regulations. These regulations are incorporated into our study through a penalty function that models taxation, strict carbon caps or cap-and-trade settings. The optimal production policy involves the optimal choice of the input mix and the production quantity that maximize the expected profit of the manufacturer. We also complement our theoretical findings with a real-life agricultural production example. We find that distinct attributes of the inputs and the optimal choice of their mixture to produce a unit quantity become particularly important when emission constraints are imposed by exogenous bodies. We find that the manufacturer copes with carbon emission regulations by switching to low emitting inputs without significant reductions in service levels up to a certain level of target emission reduction. For more ambitious target carbon emission restrictions, manufacturer decreases the service level to reduce carbon emissions even further, which surprisingly may lead to an increase in unit carbon footprint per output.

RESEARCH IN PROGRESS

Embedding-based Diet Specific Food Recommendation, with Oded Netzer and J. Jeffrey Inman

Asymmetries in Cultural Diffusion, with Olivier Toubia