time-serieseconometricshasmadeseveralimportantcontrib.docVIP

Time-series econometrics has made several important contributions in fundamental areas of marketing. As reviewed in Dekimpe and Hanssens (2000, Table 1), time-series (TS) techniques were initially used in marketing (1) for forecasting purposes, (2) to determine the temporal ordering among variables through Granger-causality tests, or (3) to determine the over-time impact of marketing variables (e.g. through transfer-function analysis). Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the use of TS-techniques, not only to demonstrate the existence of certain substantive marketing phenomena, but also to derive empirical generalizations on their relative size and frequency of occurrence. Studies in the former tradition have, for example, shown that time-series techniques can be used to quantify short-term, long-term and permanent effects (Dekimpe and Hanssens 1995), momentum (Bronnenberg, Mahajan and Vanhonacker 2000), business-as-usual, hysteresis and escalation (Dekimpe and Hanssens 1999), ad copy and repetition wearout (Naik, Mantrala, Sawyer 1998), half-life of ads (Naik 1999), synergy (Naik and Raman 2003), and strategic foresight (Naik, Raman and Winer 2005). Studies in the latter tradition include Nijs et al. (2001), Pauwels and Srinivasan (2004), and Srinivasan et al. (2004). A typical design in these studies is a two-stage approach, where, the same time-series technique is first applied to a multitude of brands and/or product categories, after which one tries to explain the observed variability in various summary statistics (e.g. short or long-run elasticity estimates) through a number of marketing-theory based hypotheses. To this end, a more marketing-theory grounded approach to TS modeling was adopted. Moreover, other key challenges identified in Dekimpe and Hanssens (2000), such as the lack of longitudinal data and the lack of dedicated time-series software, have been overcome in recent years. Still, important research opportunities and challenges rema